App: Book2Speech
Developer: Claudio Guida
Genres: Dienst­programme, Produktivität

One of the most difficult task for a visually impaired person is reading a book or a text in complete autonomy. 

Book2Speech is the revolutionary application that let you to convert a text into a audio tracks on the Apple macOS . The most important feature is its flexibility. It is based on the concept of Fragment that can be created from the original text using several methods, for example, through the selection of the desired part. Each fragment is treated by the application as a separated object and can be modified, not only in its content, but also in its voice type and rate.

Other fragment creating methods are:

* Splitting by track duration;
* Splitting by string;
* Splitting by paragraphs;

Book2Speech creates a project that can be saved at each time and can be loaded when you are ready to continue to work on it. Each project is created separately from the others in its own folder that also contains the audio files obtained from the conversion process.

Summarising Book2Speech’s features:

* Fragment creation from the source text by manual fine selection;
* Automatic fragment creation using three techniques: splitting by track duration, splitting by string and splitting by paragraph;
* Fragment editing in an independent manner in their title, content, voice and rate;
* Play each fragment before converting it;
* Save on disk the entire fragment collection;
* Delete all fragments or a specific selection;
* Apply voice and rate settings to all fragments or to a specific selection;
* Import text and PDF source files;
* Converting the entire fragment collection in audio tracks;

The user interface is totally accessible through VoiceOver and the most useful commands can be issued by shortcuts.

OTHER USES: 

Book2Speech not only allows you to convert text in audio, but also provides a new study method for visually impaired students. In fact you can create extracts of your study-book, just like sighted people do by underlining text with pencil or highlighter.

But wait, there’s more… Think about a text representing a dialog between more players like a theatrical script or a fable. Assigning a different voice to each player you can create a more dynamic and amusing audio version of the text.

While the creation of fragment from the original text by selection let you a fast drawing up of summaries, the independent editing let you to add notes and comments to the part of interests.

Release notes:
* RTF format support added;
* Added ability to insert a word before each fragment title;
* Added ability to insert a word after each fragment title;
* Minor bugs fixed;