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CLEMMONS, NC - As a highly accomplished student in Henry County, Georgia, Jake McMahon attends The Helen Keller Center for the Deaf and Blind, using Text to Speech software TextAloud in order to tutor other students on assistive technology while also streamlining the reading for his own research and studies.

Blindness hasn't kept Jake from a busy work and study schedule, and he discovered TextAloud while researching the best assistive technology software options that would help him to listen to his reading in more natural voices than those offered by most screen readers. As the simple-to-use PC software that reads almost any computer text out loud in pleasant, human-sounding computer speech, TextAloud can read e-mails, websites, articles, PDFs, documents and more. The software is priced from $29.95, and reads text directly from the PC, or exports it to spoken audio files for listening on the iPod (R), Kindle Fire (R), iPhone (R), tablet, MP3 player, or most other popular portable devices.

"Text to speech is a big interest of mine," comments Jake, "and making a change in the world for blind and visually impaired people, as well as for those who are deaf or deaf and blind is my goal." For these reasons, and more, he found TextAloud useful right away, as it enabled him to listen to his materials while at his computer, and also when "on a plane, in a car, or simply sitting on the swing at the Helen Keller National Center," he adds.

Jake also enjoyed TextAloud's user interface, which he found easy to navigate even without sight, quickly learning and remembering "every combo box, slider, and more," he says. "Effective navigation is one of the most important elements to a blind person." Jake was able to master the TextAloud user interface so quickly that he began to utilize the program when tutoring other blind students at the Helen Keller Institute, and they too found the interface just as easy to remember.

Meanwhile, the software's sophisticated yet simple voice tags and voice changes were Jake's next reason to embrace TextAloud, as the program functions with dozens of optional Premium Voices, male and female, and in a wide variety of accents and languages -- a writer's dream when it comes to listening to fiction. "I love writing stories and plays, and having different voices play different parts," adds Jake, and he quickly became adept at mixing voices for a more exciting and entertaining listening experience. "I would write the story, then use TextAloud to make sure it sounded exactly the way I wanted it," he explains. "And best of all, I could convert those stories to MP3 and have my family listen to them too!"

About TextAloud
TextAloud has been featured in The New York Times, PC Magazine, Writer's Digest, on CNN, and more. Hailed by critics and users alike, TextAloud is priced at just $29.95, and is compatible with systems using Windows (R) 98, NT, 2000, XP and VISTA. The program is available for fast, safe and secure purchase via /purchase.html.

NextUp.com also offers TextAloud with optional premium voices from AT&T Natural Voices™, Nuance®, Acapela® and Cepstral® for the most natural-sounding computer speech anywhere. Available languages include U.S. English, U.K. English, Indian Accent English, Scottish Accent English, Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Belgian Dutch, Faroese, Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, Castilian (European) Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

About NextUp.com
NextUp.com, a division of NextUp Technologies, LLC, provides award-winning Text to Speech software for consumers, business customers, educators, and those with visual or vocal impairment, or learning disabilities.

In addition to TextAloud, NextUp.com markets other innovative Windows software designed to save time and deliver vital information. NextUp Talker is an easy and affordable program that allows people who have lost their voices to use the latest in high-quality computer voices to communicate with others.

Note to Editors:

Evaluation copies of TextAloud are currently available upon request. To receive a review copy, or for more information on NextUp.com or TextAloud, please contact publicist Angela Mitchell at (904) 982-8043.

All companies and products referenced in this press release are the trademarks of their respective owners.