I use an ordinary Dell Wintel computer with a lot of RAM because the screen reader is a real memory hog. My computer is a laptop but only to save space and make it easy to get it repaired, I don’t travel with it except in the most extreme circumstances. The reason is that, even with a large laptop, I find the small screen and small keyboard difficult to work with due to my eyesight. I can do it in a pinch, but given the weight and hassle of carrying it, and the fact that I’m not that effective with it and that I _am_ pretty effective reading and sending emails and such on the phone using voice input and output, it doesn’t make sense unless I have a crucial computer project that absolutely must be carried out while I’m on the road..
Computer settings
I use the color scheme called “High Contrast #1” in Windows, it basically creates a black background and white text for Windows operations. I set the Wallpaper to plain black. I use Firefox and use the setting “Use Windows Colors” under Options; it’s also important to set the Links colors to light colors like white or yellow. I also like to set the Hover Color to light green, this helps me find the link I’m about to click on. I set the mouse cursor appearance to Extra Large, and also turn on the Mouse Trails feature, which makes it easier to find the cursor onscreen..
Computer Software
The key piece of software for me is my screen reader, Kurzweil 1000. I can copy text from almost any application — email, web page, Word document, pdf, etc. — into Kurzweil and it will read it to me. You can set it to read at any speed; start slow and then speed it up a bit every few days until you settle in at your most comfortable speed. After a while I got up to 340 words a minute for most purposes, which is 2-3 times normal talking speed, and which is about the same speed at which I read visually back when my eyesight was pretty good (340 is about one page a minute of a paperback book). I can go faster but then reading feels like work rather than pleasure. I slow it down sometimes for complex material. Interesting insight here — if someone overhears the computer reading to you at this sort of speed, they will be amazed and think it’s a miracle you can understand such gibberish. But as I say, it’s just normal reading speed, they process information at that same speed when they read by sight. People just aren’t used to taking in information that fast through their ears, and it takes a few months of practice to (literally) get up to speed.
Kurzweil 1000 is terrific but costs $995 — my employer was kind enough to buy it for me — thanks Harvard! An alternative that also works well and is only $29 or so is TextAloud. I much prefer the Kurzweil interface; and since I’m using it around 4,000 hours a year, for me it’s worth the extra money to have Kurzweil (even if I had to pay it myself). Try them out and see whether or not that’s true of you.