Hello everybody.
I’m currently a Software engineering student doing an MSc.
I plan to build a tool and a platform to help people like me read and listen more easily as part of my MSC project.
I hope to find volunteers that I can A) interview about their needs and what elements in a software/website tool would aid them, and B) beta testers of my project later down the road when I have made some progress.
As a person with dyspraxia myself and possible Adult ADHD (currently undiagnosed), I have often had real trouble reading journals, articles, pdfs and staying focused.
Throughout my time studying, I have always wished there was a tool that was free and helped me read documents/book articles more easily that was not complicated to use and preferably on the web.
Now, While I appreciate my own needs are good experience to what direction I want to go in, I would love it if you could share your ideas with me about what features would help you in this tool.
At this stage, I am just looking for indicators of interest if you want to be a volunteer and would be happy to answer a short questionnaire in the future and beta test later.
Some initial ideas of what I want to build:
A) you will be able to upload your own files and documents. This should be multi-format, including pdf word documents, ebooks or whatever.
B) you should control the size, spacing screen background colour and enable or disable word by word highlighting.
C) you should be able to select reading and highlighting word by word speed or turn it off entirely.
D) the software will automatically scroll pages for you.
E) it should remember your location and allow you to keep bookmarks
F) there should be the option for it to do Text to speech with natural-sounding human good quality voices, which you can enable or disable.
These are some basic ideas, but I would welcome more.
Please let me know your thoughts and feedback. Eventually, this tool may go beyond web-based and become a desktop application for multiple OS’s if there is time in the project.
So, what do you say? Would you like to get involved, share what you would like to see, answer a questionnaire (that I have not yet put together 
) and possibly beta test in future?
Important Part of the rules of my project is I need to get ethics committee approval before questioning anyone, so I apologise in advance if there is a delay in getting back to you. If there is reasonable interest, I will keep an eye on this forum.
Best wishes.
