After my injury I couldn't read for a month. After they treated it, I could but it was difficult. It was difficult because it was hard to make out the shapes. It was also difficult because it sucked the mental energy out of me instantly. Also my right side was numb and it was just hard to write letters. My cognitive energy budget is still small. To save some energy I researched text-to-speech voices for my computer.
I use OSX and it is built in. My research was on voices that I actually liked. I ended up going with http://www.cepstral.com/ and chose the voices Callie & David. Former female, latter male. I listened to all of them and pared it down. I'm really glad I took the time to choose voices that I liked.
They are really nice. When I am tired and reading gets difficult, I just use text-to-speech. The voices help a lot. Being able to choose between a male and female voice is also really nice because sometimes you want to hear a different voice. You can save the output as a MP3 and listen to it later on your smart-phone, for when you are not at home. I use Text2Speech PRO for that http://www.hewbo.com/.
What is your experience with text-to-speech?
What voices do you like?