Why are so many students using Text-to-Speech to read in Post-Secondary?

What is text-to-speech?

Text-to-speech (TTS) is a computer-generated voice that reads aloud selected digital text. It’s distinct from audio books, which usually use actors reading the text, and may have some dramatic production value to engage listeners. TTS is also distinct from screen readers, which are tools typically used by blind and low vision users to not only read but also operate their digital devices.

Text-to-speech can be used by any hearing person as a reading tool. The user simply selects text, and the tool reads it to them. TTS is also used by non- or semi-verbal learners as a speaking tool. These learners write text and use TTS to voice what they are saying.

Ableism colours many people’s thinking about the use of assistive technology. Often, without realizing why, we encounter a deficit-biased resistance to the use of TTS in post-secondary that can sound like:

• Listening isn’t really reading
• What are they doing in university if they can’t read
• Reading is a basic prerequisite skill for university, it’s most of what we do, if they can’t read without technology what are they doing here?

The reality is anyone choosing to use TTS to study in post-secondary is making a bold, agentive choice. It really isn’t easy. There is stigma to overcome, so many inaccessible texts to contend with, and then there are technical hurdles in assessments.

Some learners make the choice because they wouldn’t be able to attend university or college without using text-to-speech. Others choose to use it because they know it will improve their learning journey. Whether the reason to use TTS an accessibility issue or a self-efficacy one, it’s time for educators to start understanding TTS the way learners do.

Who uses text-to-speech to read?

So. Many. People.

People with:

• Vision issues
  • Temporary or permanent vision impairment
  • Dizziness
  • Nausea
  • Vision related migraines
  • Eye fatigue / needs to have eyes closed (i.e. surgery recovery)
• Attention-related issues / mind wandering challenges
  • ADHD
  • Anxiety
  • Chronic fatigue or pain
  • Brain fog
  • Studying in loud environments, moving vehicle, etc.
• Less efficient text decoding than speech comprehension
  • Dyslexics
  • Additional language learners
  • Learners building domain-specific vocabulary, etc.
• Visual information processing disorders
  • Dysgraphia
  • Figure-ground deficits
  • Visual memory deficits
• Motor disturbances / fatigue
  • Tremors
  • Arthritis
  • Temporary or permanent injury to their hands or wrists, etc.
• Conditions that limit screen time
  • Migraine conditions
  • Epilepsy
  • Long COVID, Functional Neurological Disorder, ME/CFS, etc.
  • Concussion recovery, etc.
• Busy schedules / reading goals
  • Students who study while kids play, or while washing dishes
  • Commuters who study in transit
  • Students training their reading speed and comprehension

How is text-to-speech helpful in post-secondary?

TTS is used in many different ways by many different people. Some people only listen to read. They use their eyes or hands minimally, perhaps only for operation of their device. Many, use TTS to make reading a visual and auditory experience, engaging multiple parts of the brain to level up their metacognitive skills (whether or not they know that’s what they are doing).

Some use TTS to get their work done faster, i.e., to read while they do dishes, or to increase their reading speed. We could look at that as a nice-to-have, or we could see it as a learner practicing self-efficacy – they are choosing an appropriate technology for their situation to support their learning.

Here’s some of how TTS works and helps.

Supports decoding

Students who struggle to decode as they read, dyslexics in particular, pour so much of their finite cognitive energy into decoding, that they run short for other things. Despite being brilliant thinkers, their brains have less energy (and they have less time) to spend developing and practicing the metacognitive strategies for comprehension, retention and responding to what they are reading.

You know who else uses a lot of energy decoding? Students immersed in unfamiliar vocabulary. You might think of additional language learners first, but any learner in a field with a dense, unfamiliar lexicon could find themselves drowning in slow-to-decode word soup.

TTS supports decoding by allowing learners to see and hear the words at the same time. This circumvents the issue that initially slows their reading processes, thus increasing their reading speed. For many, this support instantly increases their reading stamina and confidence.

As a result, readers are more willing to stay with a difficult text or return to it. This creates opportunities for learners to develop and practice the metacognitive strategies for comprehension, retention and responding that previously would have lagged or been missed without the support of TTS. (Parr 2012)

Supports reading fluency and (in many cases) pronunciation for vocabulary building

Fluency in reading refers to a reader’s accuracy, automaticity and expression. All learners are building their vocabulary as they read in post-secondary. As they encounter new words, their reading accuracy will correlate to their comprehension. Low accuracy equals low comprehension. Whereas, being able to accurately recognize and read words without conscious effort or individual word decoding contributes to automaticity, more efficient reading, and better comprehension.

TTS guides readers who might struggle with fluency to read at a steady pace. By allowing readers to hear new words they encounter, they are supported to build fluency as they read, without significantly slowing down. Of course, they have the option to pause the TTS to look up words when seeing and hearing a word in context isn’t sufficient for comprehension.

Some readers will be able to comprehend a text audibly before they attain visual fluency. TTS supports those learners to read at their comprehension level. They are no longer throttled by their visual fluency. This can be a huge leap forward for some.

TTS pronunciation isn’t perfect, but it is quite good, in English. It can sometimes get tripped up with homonyms like, “She will read quietly” and “he read the book last week.” Also, learners should be told to corroborate the pronunciations they hear of author’s names. That said, dense, field specific terminology can be spot on, supporting learners’ accurate acquisition of terms.

Supports efficient eye movement, for those who also read with their eyes

Some readers have very inefficient eye movements. They revisit words they’ve read, veer off the line they are on, skip ahead, get lost, and have to find the sentence they were on. They do this over and over as they read.

Many don’t know their eyes wander inefficiently. They might notice they read slower than other people, or that reading makes them tired. They might notice they seem to have to study longer than others to understand the readings, or provide responses that get satisfactory grades.

Some TTS tools highlight the text as it is being read aloud. This draws the eye to the text and discourages the eye from wandering inefficiently. Reading with this feature enabled can support training a reader to read with more efficient eye movement, just as one can train to run with a more efficient running posture.

As the reader’s eye movement becomes more efficient, reading speed, comprehension and retention tend to increase, barring no other impediments.

Supports training your reading speed.

Because TTS can support decoding, fluency, pronunciation, and improve eye movement efficiency, it has the knock-on effect of increasing reading speeds for users who struggled in these areas.

The manual manipulation of TTS reading speed allows any user to experiment with finding their:

• “Natural” reading speed, the speed that feels comfortable, without strain
  • The average reading speed for English-speaking readers reading English non-fiction is 175 – 300 (Brysbaert, 2019)
• “Optimal” reading speed, the fastest they can read without loosing comprehension and retention
  • Typically, people demonstrate a loss of comprehension or retention by 300 wpm (Schwalm et al. 2026).

Readers can try to increase their reading speed by increasing the TTS speed overtime. This guides their reading processes to function at pace.

Conveniently, readers tend to notice when they have read something too fast because they can feel that they pushed themselves and realize they don’t know anything about what they just read. (Poor comprehension can also follow reading something too slowly, but the physiological cues feel different.)

With TTS, learners have an auditory cue that throttles them from trying to progress too quickly through their speed-reading training. It takes time to get used to a fast TTS voice, so readers tend to slow it down to a speed they can interpret until they get used to it. This gives their brain systems time to train up. For TTS tools that also have a feature that visually highlights the words being read, there is the added benefit of being able to train the eyes over time to work more efficiently.

Interestingly, learners may be more likely to notice if the TTS sounds too fast than if their own reading processes are running a little slow without TTS. It might take an educator hearing how much time a learner is putting into their readings (without demonstrating comprehension) to connect some dots and suggest they consider trying TTS for more efficient reading sessions.

Supports students with access needs (becomes someone’s hands, eyes or voice)

For some learners, TTS is the only way they can read. It isn’t a boost. It isn’t a helper. It stands in for their eyes on the scree, or their hands turning pages or manipulating the scroll bar.

For these learners, the metacognitive strategies they are practicing when they use TTS might overlap with learners who use TTS to support any of the above needs, but some needs will be quite distinct. Consider the additional cognitive load of learners who only listen to learn, who cannot visually scan the heading structure before or during reading, and who don’t have a visual page to highlight, or anchor their memory to.

These TTS users build atypical “crip-hack” strategies because common strategies like highlighting and annotating in the margins aren’t available to them. The TTS technology itself is only one assistive tool in these learners’ reading toolkit. They often buildout their own memory strategies or develop hacks to minimize the effort needed to complete other work tasks because reading/retention/responding to reading is so effortful, even with TTS.

This is just an overview of some of the common benefits and reasons learners might be using TTS in your classrooms. There are others, which is why there is a growing number of students now using text-to-speech in university and colleges.

It’s inappropriate to ask learners why they use TTS, but it is good for educators to ask learners how they find using it for learning. What hurdles they encounter? What isn’t working? It’s not easy and students using TTS often experience many additional, hidden stresses that it’s good to be aware of.

Why is text-to-speech hard to use in post-secondary?

Have you ever tried listening to an APA paper, dense with citations on TTS? It can start to feel like every other thought is punctuated or interrupted with the series of names and dates. On top of that, some articles’ headers and footers are also picked up by text-to-speech. Meaning, every 300 words or so, the reader has to ignore the interruption of the title of the journal, the page number, and DOI being repeated before the sentence they were reading completes!

Someone reading by sight can choose to visually filter citations, footnotes, headings and footers by skimming them, or looking right past them. Someone reading by TTS cannot easily filter these out. Some articles and TTS tools skip headings and footers some don’t. Some read only the author’s name but not the date in a citation. It’s not consistent and importantly, the filters are not in the reader’s control.

Having to parse significant and insignificant information frequently while reading, adds to the readers’ cognitive load. For some, the agitation this causes is too much and they will opt not to use TTS for academic articles. For many the difficulty is something they get used to and experience as an offset for the gains and access the tool provides.

That said, the tool only provides access to digitally accessible texts. When educators use readings that are inaccessible, such as paper handouts, scans of photocopies, or photos of a page, students who need TTS are stuck. Some tools and some schools have what are called optical character recognition (OCR) software, that can be used to translate images of text to digital text but you never know how well it will work. It also adds an inequitable workload to disabled learners to charge them with making accessible versions of texts for themselves.

Very often, students who try to OCR articles for themselves end up with symbols replacing letters in words, or complete sections that are illegible. Some students (often only blind learners) are eligible for the accessibility office to produce an accessible version for them, but that can cause delays for the student. The only way to know that all your learners will have equitable access to the readings you choose is to give them the readings in accessible formats.

How can educators ensure learners using text-to-speech have equitable and agentive learning experiences?

• Learn to check for digitally accessible texts. How? You can:
  • Check with your library
  • Try to select text in the file (generally, if you can’t select text, the text-to-speech tool won’t be able to read text.)
  • Try listening to the file yourself
• Curate digitally accessible readings.
• Write to the library and the publisher when readings aren’t available in accessible formats. Versions may only be available on request. Anticipate there might be delays as some publishers will wait to make an accessible version until a request is made. That say, a version may already be made, it just might not be part of your library’s licence agreement without an “access” request.
• Make your own documents accessible. From your syllabi, to your LMS entries, to your assessments, keep in mind they might all be read with text-to-speech tools.
• Encourage your students to make their documents accessible. Students are better able to peer review papers, and participate fully in group projects when colleagues can prepare documents they can read efficiently with text-to-speech.

Reflection: In your teaching workflow, would you say you have been mindful of the reasons people use TTS when you curate readings?

How are you otherwise prioritizing learner’s accessibility and agency?

How might your learnings influence how you curate and share readings? What is the next step in your learning journey?

References and related readings

Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047

Jackson, R. M. (2021). Audio-Supported Reading for Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired. National Centre on Accessible Educational Materials, 19.

Schwalm, L., Radach, R., & Kuperman, V. (2026). Testing the Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off in Reading: Effects of Reading Speed on Comprehension and Eye Movements. Scientific Studies of Reading, 30(4), 327–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2025.2612649

Parr, M. (2012). The Future of Text-to-Speech Technology: How Long before it’s Just One More Thing we do When Teaching Reading? Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Conference on Education & Educational Psychology (ICEEPSY 2012), 69, 1420–1429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.12.081

What I Didn’t Know About Text-to-Speech When I Started Using it in University.