Shoshanah Forbes posts a neat tip about using Adobe Acrobat (with OpenOffice) for verbal proofreading of long documents – Use OpenOffice to create a “tagged PDF” version of the document, and then use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader’s Read Out Loud option (in Acrobat Reader 7, that’s in the View menu) to listen to the document – misspelled words will be easy to notice by the way they are mispronounced.
It sounds a bit like a Speak&Spell, but it does sentences quite well (with the pauses of the punctuation), and has a much, much better vocabulary. Not as fun as the voice-activated Mac (Computer! Start FireFox!
), but amusing in its way. And now, apparently, even useful.