Take Care of Your Eyes: Read with Your Ears!

So far on this blog Judy and I have been talking about all the wonderful resources online that you can use to put the web to work for your business. It is exciting: What with ebooks, blogs, online books, online courses, forums, chat, and social apps like Facebook and Twitter it is easy for us to spend hours at the computer in a Feeding Frenzy and all this reading online (On Screen) can quickly lead to eyestrain.

One thing we can do to help prevent eyestrain is to stay conscious of the time we spend with eyes glued to the computer screen and take frequent vision breaks to relax our eye muscles. But another thing we can do is simply reduce our online reading time by using our ears to consume the text instead. How do we do that? Well, I have found a couple of little programs that Read text to me and this has made all the difference.

My favorite program is called Deskbot. Deskbot is a freeware, multi-featured Clipboard Reader, Text Reader, Time Announcer, Desktop Application for Microsoft Windows featuring Microsoft Agent Animated, Talking Characters. You can download it here.

My second favorite program is Natural Reader. This Text-to-Speech Program has a free version that you can use not only to read web pages, but also convert the text to mp3’s which you can put on your ipod or mp3 player for later listening. (You can “read” saved blog posts while commuting, waiting at the doctor’s office or …) The only thing I don’t care for in the free version of Natural Reader is how mechanical the voices are but for around $50.00 you can puchase the Personal version of the program which comes with 2 more natural voices. Personally, I like the “Kate” and “Paul” voices the best. Find out more about Natural Reader here.

Of course the great thing about Michael Cheney’s Affiliate course is not only does he provide all his fantastic information in downloadable PDF files, he also gives it to you in fun videos and mp3 files that you can listen to on your iPod and consume with your ears