A friend just told me about RSVP FastReader, a utility that takes text and presents it word-after-word very quickly in one spot on your screen. It’s intended for devices with small displays.
I just downloaded and installed it and tried it out with the sample text. I had it cranked up to speed 6 and could understand the sentences coming in. However, unfamiliar terms such as names and new words went by too fast. They need to be presented more slowly. I think it works best when the words are familiar but the sentences aren’t.
I cranked it to 10. It was then like having a pressurised IV straight through my eye sockets into my brain.
twitch
Doesn’t seem to be good for reflection on the material though. Maybe it’s like TV in that respect?
Oh, and it goes past 11.
Was that a free trial download? I’d like to try it, but its not really clear how to download it. (I haven’t had much experience downloading stuff, anyway).
This is the link to download page
Not interested in downloading the prog myself, so I can’t tell you whether there is a registration fee or not – however, nothing on the page suggests there is.
For more info, you could always wait to hear back from the OP. Thus rendering this post completely irrelevant. But that’s OK, I’ll live.
::::::::sniff::::::::::
I’ve tried a similar program before. Not my thing. However, I’d like to find a good freeware/shareware text narrator. Is there any out there that only reads highlighted text on a screen. Maybe with an item added to the right-click menu. In other words, you highlight some text on a page, then right-click and select “Read Selected Text”.
The programs I’ve used before read the whole page, from top to bottom. This is okay for short text files, but doesn’t work well on web pages, and isn’t practical for long text files - like PDFs. (You can’t bookmark where you left off; the narrator will start at the beginning of the file the next time you open it.)
Anyhoo…
Hi, Maastricht! 
Yes, that Sourceforge page is not the most intuitive, is it? Sourceforge offers locations for software collabarations on an ongoing basis, so often what you get is source code that you have to compile and install yourself.
This particular download, however, is a zip file. To download it:[ol][li]Click on the filename “fastreader.zip” on the page that Red Fury linked to. The zip file downloads. []Save it to an empty directory. []Unzip it. It unzips to a set of files, one of which is named setup.exe. [*]Execute setup.exe. It installs the FastReader program.[/ol][/li]
This is an open-source project, so there is no payment involved.
Beauty Personified,since this is an open-source project. Anyone can theoretically extend the program to make it do what they want, and then contribute those changes back to the main development team. After poking around on those pages, it seems to me that there’s not a lot of development activity going on on this project. If you program, maybe you can add those desired features…