Giving Voice to a Community

In the eight years since its launch, Voice Dream Reader has become one of the most popular apps in the accessibility field, a go-to tool for reading text aloud from web pages, PDFs, and other documents.

But its developer, Winston Chen, didn’t design it for that purpose. In fact, it was only with the help of early users—one in particular—that he realized its potential to change lives.

“I didn’t have this group of users in mind when I wrote Voice Dream Reader,” he says. “It took this meandering path.”

The path starts in 2011, when Chen left a stable job with a Boston tech company, packed up his wife and kids, and moved to Rødøya, a remote outpost in Norway. (Population: under 200.) The idea was to get away from it all, indulge in open spaces, and reconnect as a family.

But sometime in the Nordic winter, Chen felt the itch to work on a project. “It was getting dark and really cold and I needed something to occupy my mind,” he says.

He began teaching himself app design (in case you’re wondering, internet access in Rødøya was surprisingly good), building something that people could use to read websites and PDFs during commutes, workouts, or, hypothetically, long treks into the Arctic wilderness.

The result, Voice Dream Reader, arrived on the App Store in 2012 to little fanfare. Chen didn’t think much about it, until he received an email from a math teacher in Kentucky.

Ken Thompson, a middle school teacher in Louisville, noticed that a student with a solid understanding of math was struggling with tests. The challenge wasn’t the subject itself; it was the student’s difficulty understanding the questions because of a reading disability.

Thompson knew the student would excel with a little extra attention, but he had a class full of kids to teach. So he did a little online sleuthing and found Voice Dream Reader. The results were immediate.

“The first time we took a test for real, the student scored exactly as I thought he would,” says Thompson, now retired. “That’s when I thought, ‘This could make things a lot better for him.’”

Thompson saw the app’s potential—and also several ways it could be improved. “It didn’t do exactly what I needed,” he says, “but it came very close. So I started emailing Winston.”

Thompson told Chen his story and asked for a few new features. “That was most of my email early on: ‘I found this useful, but could you do this for me?’” he says.

In fact, Thompson was the first of many to write to Chen. Within months of his app’s release, Chen was hearing from all manner of users: People with dyslexia, learning differences, or who were blind or had low vision reached out not just to express their gratitude but to suggest ways to improve the app.

Sarah Metivier, coordinator of accommodations in the accessibility office at Illinois State University, was surprised how responsive Chen was when she wrote. “Not only did the disability community get behind him, he learned as much as he could about them. He transformed himself so he could better other people.”

Richard Turner, a blind user in Portland, Oregon, reached out early on to volunteer his editing expertise. He has served as a beta tester ever since. “As soon as I found it, I was hooked,” he says. Turner has since introduced the app to others through his work at the Oregon Commission for the Blind.

All this attention caught Chen by surprise. “It was totally new to me,” he says. “I had to look up ‘what is dyslexia.’”

Voice Dream Reader became successful enough to support Chen and his family when they returned to Boston in 2012; it’s now used by hundreds of thousands of people. Chen went on to launch the text-to-speech app Voice Dream Writer and the text-recognition app Voice Dream Scanner. In 2016 he received a prestigious Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind.

Today, Chen is widely recognized as a leader in accessibility innovation, but he still marvels that his app serves hundreds of thousands of people, all because an early user saw how it could help one.

Voice Dream - Read Aloud

Text to Speech Reader

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