Read2Go app for iPhone and iPad
Read2Go is an accessible ebook reader that makes reading Bookshare titles easy.
Bookshare is the world’s largest accessible online library for people with print disabilities with over 345,000 titles. For questions on whether Bookshare is for right for you or for someone you know with a qualifying print disability, please refer to www.bookshare.org. The Help Center on the Bookshare site offers assistance in preparing your membership and in using this app or other ebook readers with Bookshare.
From within Read2Go, you can browse, search, download, and read books directly from Bookshare using your Bookshare membership, as well as read DAISY books from other sources. The app gives you full control over visual choices for font size and color, background and highlighting color, and text-to-speech preferences. Read2Go features word-by-word highlighting for multi-modal reading.
“Im a high school student with dyslexia and find Bookshare essential to help me read all of my school books. With Read2Go I can download a book and start reading it in seconds. I dont stick out in class because people are familiar with iPods.” - 15-year old student
“The Read2Go app is beautiful in its simplicity. The navigation tools allow even young students to use it effortlessly. The highlighted text-to-speech provides a wonderful opportunity for individuals with print disabilities to increase word recognition and improve fluency. Bravo Bookshare for making a complex process appear seamless and effortless, a true mark of excellence.” – Parent of child with a print disability.
“I now rely solely on Read2Go for daily reading of the NY Times and my local papers. While waiting on the BART train concourse, commuting to work, flying from Oakland to Los Angeles and to the east coast, Read2Go grants me instant access and ease of use to capture and read many books and publications.” – Adult with a print disability.
Features:
• Access the Bookshare collection directly from the app
• Browse, search and download books quickly and easily, including those with images
• Read words on the screen with synchronized text-to-speech (Read2Go audio on)
• Read with highly natural Acapela voices and navigate with VoiceOver gestures (Read2Go audio on, VoiceOver on)
• Read with Apple VoiceOver gestures and voice (VoiceOver on, Read2Go audio off)
• Read with many choices of font size, color and backgrounds, and no voices (Read2Go and VoiceOver off)
• Read with Braille displays connected via Bluetooth
• Save books into Read2Go so you can read anywhere
• Adjust font size up to 70 pts
• Adjust text-to-speech audio, either on or off for text-only or text-to-speech mode
• Adjust rate of audio
• View Table of Contents
• Set bookmarks
• Read from where you left off (auto-resume reading position)
• Support for all 6 levels of DAISY navigation built in to structure of book
• Supports DAISY 3.0 and 2.02
• Supports use of iTunes to transfer of non-Bookshare DAISY books to your device
• Supports “Open In Read2Go” for easy access to your books from the Bookshare website
• Educational institutions wishing to purchase 20 licenses or more can get a discount through the Apple Volume Licensing Program for Education
Latest reviews of Read2Go app for iPhone and iPad
It doesnt let me use my name and password. It also says that it doesnt recognize my email, so I cant reset my password. Then I find out that I have to have a disability to use it, but youll take my money even though I am not authorized to use it. Can you say refund!
Im having a lot of issues with this app. It will completely lose my place while Im reading a book. Any book. Please fix this its irritating the crap out of me...
I decided to check out Bookshare because I was very disappointed that the intermediate algebra math ebook I just paid $135 for from Amazon had been neutered by the publisher. So for $19.99, what do you get with this app? The ability to have a textbook from the Bookshare catalog read out loud to you while you watch the words scroll by on the screen. Since the Bookshare version of the textbook I wanted didnt come with any images, Im only getting text read to me. So this is why I state in the title of this review that this app is one more tool to use in a learning disabled or visually impaired persons educational plan. I have the same textbook recorded in audio that was professionally recorded. This textbook and others can be obtained through a nonprofit organization called Learning Ally. However, Learning Ally provides audio-only format for most of their books. which is why this app is wonderful to use with Bookshare as a supplement to whatever youre already doing in order to get your textbooks in an accessible format. Lastly, one thing I dont think its necessarily made clear in this apps description is the fact that in order to use the app, you have to already be a qualified member of the Bookshare program. This app was not intended to be used by the general public, and if you buy it just so you can listen to audiobooks, then youve just wasted $20.
Update. The only feature/change I see after updating is that the reading speed is very slow. This developer only updates this app about once a year, I dont have any hopes they will fix it any time soon. The updates make things worse. Old review follows, all the issues are still in the app. This app is still terrible! I will list a few things here that do not work or do not work well in this app. Reading a synopsis of the book requires two steps, you have to tap on the book title, then you tap book details, then when you tap back to get back to the booklist, it starts you back at the top of the book list. browsing through book categories starts you at the very first books added, so every time you go into a category to browse you start with the books that were added in 2001. The app does not have a category for the New York Times bestseller list, unbelievable. I have also recently discovered that when you tap on the latest books category you can only browse through the first 100, there is no way to load the next set of books. I have my account set to display 100 results, if youve chosen a different amount you probably only get to see 20. I hate this app! They do not seem to care if the users are satisfied with the performance, every time I have contacted them in the past I have never gotten any results whatsoever.
My daughter is a huge reader but also legally blind so a program like Read2Go is very important to us. There are some aspects of this app that are fantastic but others that are extremely frustrating. The availability of books, especially newer books is great, sometimes it works better for my daughter to have the app read to her and that works quite well, the voice sounds almost human. The text size is also easy to adjust. However, this app is ridiculously glitchy. Either the book randomly returns to the beginning of the book, or the last page and it is constantly crashing. The only way around this is to add frequent bookmarks to make it easier to find her place again after the inevitable crash. So unfortunately the negative outweighs the positive. Every time there is a new update I get hopeful that the app will get more stable but it hasnt happened yet.