Evanreads

Comparisons / Read&Write

A Read&Write alternative for getting through the reading

Read&Write is the most complete literacy toolbar there is, and if your campus licenses it you should use it. Here is the narrower thing Evanreads does instead, and what it does not do.

The short answer. If your school or campus already licenses Read&Write, start there — it covers far more ground than we do, and it is the destination Snap&Read was folded into. Evanreads is worth a look if the specific problem is finishing assigned reading, and you would rather not wait on a licence.

Start here: if your campus already licenses it, use it

This is the first thing worth saying, because for a lot of people it is the answer.

Read&Write is the most complete literacy toolbar available, it is already deployed across a great many schools and campuses, and it is the product Snap&Read and Co:Writer were folded into when they were retired. If your disability services office hands you a licence, take it. It will do more for you than we will.

We are not going to argue otherwise in order to sell you something.

What Read&Write actually covers

It is worth being specific about the size of the gap, because it is large. On Everway's own account, Read&Write includes text-to-speech with word highlighting, a Screenshot Reader that pulls text out of images and PDFs, picture and text dictionaries, Simplify / Rewordify for breaking down difficult passages, translation, speech-to-text dictation, word prediction, screen masking, vocabulary list building, and conversion of text to audio files. It runs on six platforms and inside Canvas, Brightspace, Google Docs and Word.

Evanreads does perhaps a third of that list, and has no answer at all to most of the rest.

The narrower thing we do instead

Evanreads is not a toolbar. It is one reading surface, built around a single question: can you get to the end of the thing you were assigned, and did any of it stay in your head?

So it works differently in three ways that matter.

It moves you through the reading rather than treating the page. Screen masking dims what is around your eye. Evanreads shows the reading one line or one section at a time and holds the current line in a fixed position, so your eye stops running ahead of your comprehension and there is a definite thing to do next.

It measures your actual pace. Not an average reading speed applied to a word count — how fast you read this, so "this will take forever" becomes a number. Avoidance usually starts with not knowing how much is left.

It asks you questions afterwards. Short retrieval questions on what you just read, so you find out what did not land while there is still time to do something about it. Being asked beats re-reading, and no toolbar does this.

It also reads scanned PDFs with on-device OCR, which is often the difference between a course packet being usable and being skipped.

What we do not do

Plainly, because you are trying to decide and a list of only the good parts will not help.

Evanreads will not annotate your PDF, simplify or reword difficult passages, translate anything, take dictation, predict words, build a bibliography, or run on a native mobile app. There is no LMS integration and no campus admin console — accounts are individual, and nothing is reported back to your institution.

If you need the words changed rather than presented differently, we are the wrong tool and Read&Write is trying to be the right one.

A note on conformance reports, since specialists ask

Everway lists a VPAT for Read&Write alongside conformance reports for its other products. We tried to read it and were asked to sign in to a Google account, so we cannot tell you what standard or level it claims. That is what we observed, not a claim that the document is inadequate — if you can open it, it may answer your questions completely.

Ours is a direct download from this site, with no sign-in, and there is a page written specifically for disability services offices with the conformance detail and a copy-paste description for a resource list.

How to decide

• Your campus licenses Read&Write — use it. It is broader, it is supported, and someone has already paid for it.
• You need simplification, translation, annotation or writing support — Evanreads does none of those and will not.
• You are documenting an accommodation and need a conformance report you can file — check whether you can open Everway's; ours is on this site without a sign-in.
• The problem is that the reading does not get done — that is the one we built for. It is free to start and takes about a minute to know whether it helps.

Side by side

Download the full comparison (PDF) — every capability we could verify, across Read&Write, NaturalReader and Kurzweil 3000 together, with a source for each row and the date it was checked.

What Evanreads does not do

• Highlighting and annotation on the source document
• Vocabulary simplification and rewording (Read&Write has Simplify / Rewordify)
• Translation of the reading itself
• Dictation, word prediction and other writing support
• Picture and text dictionaries
• Exporting a reading as an audio file
• Native mobile apps
• LMS integration, rostering or any campus admin layer

Sources

• Everway — Read&Write for Education
• Everway — Read&Write pricing
• Texthelp — product VPATs