Quite a while ago I listened to this great podcast about computer access for the visually impaired. Jon Udell interviews Susan Gerhart. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, I would recommend listening to it.
One of the items she mentioned is an open source screen reader available from:
I’m just about to download and install it myself. As I’m an auditory learner I want to see if it can read academic articles to me in the hope that I will be able to retain the knowledge better that way!