Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.

I think the issue is the compute power needed for good voice models is far from free just in hardware and electricity, so any good text to audio solution likely needs to cost some money. Wiring up Google vertex AI text to speech or the aws equivalent is probably something chat gpt could walk most people through even without a CS degree, a simple python script you could authenticate from a terminal command, and would maybe cost a couple bucks for personal usage

A service you can pay for of that simplicity probably doesn’t exist because there are other tools that integrate better with how the blind interact with computers, I doubt it’s copy and pasting text, and those tools are likely more robust albeit expensive