Evanreads

Snap&Read is retired — what to use instead

Snap&Read was retired on 31 December 2025 and its features are moving into Read&Write. Here's the official path, what to look for in a replacement, and where a focused reading tool fits instead.

The short answer. If your school already licenses Read&Write, that is the intended path and the least disruptive one. Evanreads is worth a look if what you actually used Snap&Read for was getting through assigned reading, and you want something free that works without your institution buying anything.

What actually happened

Snap&Read and Co:Writer were retired on 31 December 2025. Everway (formerly Texthelp, which now owns the Don Johnston products) is folding their functionality into Read&Write, described as bringing them together "into one unified literacy tool".

Before that, the products went into maintenance mode: licences could no longer be purchased or renewed, and only critical and security fixes shipped — no new features.

If you go looking for the old product page, donjohnston.com/product/snap-read/ now redirects to Everway's sunset notice. The software is gone, and so is its documentation.

The official path is Read&Write

This is worth saying plainly before anything else, because it is probably the right answer for most people reading this: if your school or district already licenses Read&Write, that is the intended migration and the least disruptive one. Everway's position is that existing Read&Write users continue with no downtime, and that the Snap&Read capabilities are being absorbed there.

We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you something. If you need vocabulary levelling, translation, annotation on the document itself, or a bibliography builder, Read&Write is the product that is trying to replace those, and Evanreads does none of them.

Where Evanreads actually fits

Snap&Read was a broad literacy toolbar. People used it for very different things, and only one of those things is what Evanreads does.

If what you used it for was getting through assigned reading — the PDF you have opened four times and still cannot describe — then a focused reading tool is a closer fit than a toolbar, and you do not need an institution to buy it.

Evanreads presents a reading one line or one section at a time, holds the current line in place, measures your actual reading pace rather than guessing it, and asks you short retrieval questions afterwards so you find out what did not land while you can still do something about it. It reads scanned PDFs with on-device OCR, which is usually the difference between a course packet being usable and being skipped.

The free plan is 20 readings a month, up to 5 pages in a single session, and you do not need an account to try it. If you outgrow that, the Student plan is $7/month with a school email address.

Why there is no feature-by-feature table

Most comparison pages would put Snap&Read in a column beside us and tick boxes. We are not doing that, for a reason worth stating.

Snap&Read's documentation was retired along with the product. There is no longer a vendor page describing what it did, which means any feature-by-feature claim we made about it would be us characterising a competitor's product from memory, with nothing you could check. That is not a comparison, it is an assertion — and it is the kind that ages into a false claim without anyone noticing.

So the table at the foot of this page describes only what Evanreads does and does not do. The things it does not do are listed as plainly as the things it does, because you are trying to work out whether to switch, and a list of only the good parts would not help you do that.

How to decide

Your institution licenses Read&Write — start there. It is the vendor-sponsored path and it is trying to cover the whole surface Snap&Read covered.
You need levelling, translation, annotation or citations — Evanreads does not do those, and will not.
You mainly need to get through your reading, and you would rather not wait on a licence — try Evanreads. It is free to start, runs in a browser, and takes about a minute to know whether it helps.

If you are a disability services office rather than a student, there is a page written for you with the conformance detail and a copy-paste blurb for your resource list.

What Evanreads does, and what it does not

Capability	Evanreads
Reads one line or one section at a time — The current line is held in a fixed position, so your eye stops running ahead of your comprehension.	Yes
OpenDyslexic and adjustable spacing — Independent controls for typeface, type size, line height and letter spacing.	Yes
Text-to-speech — Uses your browser's own speech engine, so there is nothing extra to install. Nothing plays automatically.	Yes
OCR for scanned PDFs — Course packets and photographed chapters with no text layer are read on-device.	Yes
Retention quizzes after reading — 2 per reading on the free plan.	Yes
Works without your institution buying anything — 20 readings a month, up to 5 pages per session, no account needed to start.	Yes
Annotation, highlighting and note-taking on the source document — You can flag lines and write notes against a reading, but Evanreads is not a document annotator and does not write back to your PDF.	No
Vocabulary simplification or text levelling — Evanreads changes how text is presented, never the words themselves. Nothing is rewritten or simplified.	No
Translation — The interface is available in English and Spanish; the reading itself is never translated.	No
Bibliography and citation tools — Not built, and not planned.	No
Institutional admin console, rostering or usage reporting — Accounts are individual. There is nothing for a school to administer and no usage reported back to a campus.	No

Sources

Evanreads is a web app — the interactive reader needs JavaScript, but everything on this page is readable without it.

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