Don Johnston Announces Snap&Read Screen Reader

Don Johnston today announced Snap&Read, a software toolbar that reads any text on-screen as it floats over any application. Its one-button interface reads both accessible and inaccessible text aloud from Flash Web sites, Word documentss, PDFs, Web-based tests, Web-delivered curriculum, and even dialog boxes.

To read text aloud, users launch the Snap&Read floating toolbar and select text on-screen. That text is automatically read in high quality text-to-speech voices. Snap&Read also features built-in optical character recognition (OCR) to read text delivered through inaccessible formats like Flash and text-based images.

Snap&Read was designed to make the curriculum more accessible for students with disabilities. "We made Snap&Read so affordable and easy to use that districts could put it everywhere and implement it right away" explains Ruth Ziolkowski, president of Don Johnston, in a statement. "A lot of districts are striving for Universal Design for Learning, and Snap&Read is a step in the right direction."

Snap&Read requires minimal training to learn. "While all of our assistive technology tools are designed so that educators can learn them in 30-minutes, Snap&Read is so simple it can be trained in five-minutes," explains Kevin Johnston, director of product design at Don Johnston. "The simplicity is a huge benefit. Students with disabilities already have enough challenges learning to read and write. Their assistive technology tools should be so simple and intuitive that they can get up and running instantly. That was one of our goals when we designed Snap&Read."

Snap&Read is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems. The software can be installed on computer hard drives or it can run directly from USB/Flash drives without installing to a hard drive.

Snap&Read is scheduled to ship this spring.School districts can purchase an unlimited Snap&Read site license for just $399 per school through special introductory pricing or $79 per computer. School districts purchasing district-wide qualify for a discount. The Unlimited Site License includes unlimited school use for all students as well as take-home rights. Colleges and universities can purchase Snap&Read for $799 (institutions with less than 10,000 students enrolled) or $999 (10,000 or more students enrolled).