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Add to SafariWhen comparing Voice Dream Reader vs Instapaper, the Slant community recommends Voice Dream Reader for most people. In the question“What are the best apps for people have Dyslexia?” Voice Dream Reader is ranked 1st while Instapaper is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Voice Dream Reader is:
If you look at the screen while the app is reading, the text scrolls and emphasizes the sentence and the individual words as they are read, kinda like high quality karaoke lyrics.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to follow along with your eyes
If you look at the screen while the app is reading, the text scrolls and emphasizes the sentence and the individual words as they are read, kinda like high quality karaoke lyrics.
Pro Imported document (PDF, ePub, Doc, Mobi, TXT) is displayed in an easy to read, nicely arranged format.
VDR arranges most documents you import into a clean, easy to read format that is customizable. Can control the size of margins, select from several fonts & adjust the size, change text, background & highlight colours. Can swipe and view text in original layout/format or view as plain text and lose all the formatting for a simpler view of material.
Pro Dropbox source
By being able to connect to Dropbox in the Voice Dream Reader app, you can open and read books that are stored in your Dropbox account.
Pro Highlighting text
Allows highlighting text on the fly.
Pro Inexpensive
Compared to the alternatives, this is a cheap solution.
Pro Very efficient voices
Pro Has the best share implementation I've seen on iOS
Voice Dream Reader has a share sheet extension for iOS. When you use it, there are three options, you can save in Aritcle format (text and images), PDF format, and Full Text format. and it will show you a preview of what it will look like so you know what to expect.
Pro Has OCR companion app
Here.
Pro Instant pickup
Just click on a new page or new paragraph to skip boring sections. Also, allows speed increments changes to a very small accurate degree - i.e. to read at the right speed.
Pro Reflows PDF text content as plain text
This feature lets you read along beautifully and in the focused and pac man modes. Great for studying purposes.
Pro Annotation tools
Allows leaving notes attached to articles and highlighting certain part of the text. Free version of the app is limited to 5 highlights a month.
Pro Excellent typography choices
Instapaper allows you to choose from 14 different fonts, some of which have been designed specifically for the application. You can manually adjust spacing between lines, padding around text and font size to fit your preferences.
Pro Allows listening to articles
Instapaper comes with a build in text-to-speech feature that will read out loud articles. Premium version of the app allows creating playlists.
Pro Articles can be emailed to Instapaper
You can add articles to Instapaper by sending them to a unique email address associated with your account.
Pro Pagination
Allows for pagination, not just scrolling.
Pro Awesome offline mode
Pro Can look up words in a dictionary and Wikipedia
Pro Can be set to switch to dark mode based on time of day
Instapaper includes a dark theme and allows switching to it after a set period in time or gradually over the course of the day.
Pro Rarely seen organization options
In addition to allowing you to sort articles by when you saved them, you can also order articles by length or read progress and popularity.
Pro Free archiving of deleted webpages
In Pocket, this is a paid function - but Instapaper provides this for free! If a webpage is deleted, it remains in your Instapaper and they even archive pictures of the articles.
Pro Can playback inline video
Instapaper will play videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources that are embedded in articles, but you have to be online for playback to work.
Pro Has a font designed for readers with Dyslexia
Instapaper includes Dyslexie a font that helps people with reading problems understand the text better.
Pro Includes optional social features
If you set your Instapaper profile to be public, your friends will be able to see articles you've liked.
Cons
Con Ugly interface
The interface is ugly and not well thought out. For instance, putting items in folders removes the details from the list and replaces it with the name of the folder. Also, adding folder names has an ugly double popup.
Con Cannot read via OCR
If you have image based PDFs for example, this won't be able to read it, at least not without pre processing with other OCR software before exporting/uploading to Dream Reader. That being said, VoiceDream Reader now has a companion app to make OCR > Voice Dream Reader very simple and easy. Visit this link.
Con Can't play DRM protected content
Con Few voices
When bought, a voice package from the iOS App Store, as part of a package with voice writer & voice dream, had over 20 voices/accents, now there are only 2 voices.
Con Became a paid service again
Most functions, like search, became premium.
Con Basic search not free
Basic search for link title or website too is part of the premium.
Con Embedded images and videos are sometimes ignored
Instapaper sometimes saves articles without images or videos.
Con Only supports English
It only supports English, and not Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Con Tags not implemented
Con Search functions return random articles
The search function is very slow and does not provide accurate results. The user can not filter or reorder the search results, or search the archive or annotated articles.
