Every Apple Macintosh computer for the last 5 years has had the ability to read/speak written words, no matter what they are composed in (I use Microsoft Word), in a variety of different voices. You can just type in a paragraph, sentence, or whole document and let it speak the document to you. It stumbles over highly technical words, and tries to pronounce them by some algorithm that isn't always accurate, but for something that comes free in every computer of theirs, it is a really good solution. The difference between this solution and the professional multi-thousands-of-dollars units that are out there is that the others will say each word as you type it and the computer recognizes it. Apple requires that the words are highlighted and then you hit a speak text button and it will speak them.