i know its a long shot, but i’m wondering if anyone knows of a decent text-to-speech program that will ‘speak’ highlighted text in a web browser. i’ve tried a few, but they all sound like shit and aren’t as easy to understand as i.e. the standard Windows speech synthesizer.
What for?
scribd.com has some ebooks I want to read, but its more convenient to get them in audio form so I can do other stuff while i listen to it.
Can’t you get the audio books anyway?
on Scribd.com? no. it’s a website for peer-to-peer document sharing. some people upload PDF versions of books. check it out.
listening to a book in hawking mode would prob suck ass tbh
Every book in the world should have an audio version read by Morgan Freeman.
it can add to the effect depending on the book. for example I’d say the McKenna book I’m listening to is enhanced by being read by a robot voice, except that McKenna’s style of speaking is way more entertaining.
The only problem is that shitty speech synthesis sounds bad and is hard to understand. I downloaded Microsoft’s vision-impaired accessibility speech synthesizer, and it sounds very natural and hardly robotic at all, but it reads EVERYTHING on the screen rather than just what I highlight.
its cool how actual blind people work screen readers. they can underestand it when its going crazy fast so it just sounds like weird noise
I improved it for you.
More like you completely ruined books for blind people who can’t read Braille. 
if you enable subs + audio description on a dvd you can watch it without listening to it or looking at it think about that
“As it turns out, Jack was Tyler Durden the whole time! Holy shit I didn’t see that one coming! Ohh, sorry about. Also, Tyler Durden just passed out on the bed because of the previous revelation. Man, Ed. Norton really was slim in this movie.”
The name of the character Norton plays in “Fight Club” is not Jack. His name is never told. “Jack” is the name of the guy who wrote and left all the creepy notes in Durden’s abandoned old house.
Most people call him The Narrator, but I like to call him Jack or Rupert or Cornelius.
Or Patrick Stewart