Read & Write Chrome Plugin

Read&Write for Google Chrome is a Text-to-Speech program (TTS) that can be used to listen back to text that appears in web pages or in the online word processor Google Docs.

Students who have applied for a Disabled Students Allowance (DSA) may have received a desktop (offline) version of this software, which can be used to read back Word documents and PDF files stored offline on a computer. Read&Write for Google Chrome is slightly different; it is a plugin for Google’s free Chrome web browser. This means that the web pages and documents you want to listen to must be viewed in Chrome.

When you start using the Read&Write plugin for Chrome you will have a 30 day trial. But even after the trial is over you can still use it to listen back to web pages and text in Google Docs.

Using the plugin you can:

• Listen to web pages, instead of reading them from a computer screen. Just select some text, and click play.
• Write your own documents using a free Google Docs account, (or convert from existing Word documents), then use Read&Write to proofread what you have written.
• Select some text, and hit the play button – follow along as the sentences and words being read back to you are highlighted. This is helpful if you find that you sometimes skip lines when reading.
• Reduce the speed of the voice if it is going too fast.
• Pick up on mistakes more easily by listening to exactly what is on the page.
• Remember – you can still save, print, and download documents that you’ve written in Google Docs, just as if you’d written them in Word.