tony, my "viewer" program has text-to-speech. right now i've just turned it on for the mac, because speech synthesis is so easy there... but if you are on windows, and you're willing to give me feedback on it, i'll do the extra work to make windows work too, if that's what you own, as the headers from your e-mail would indicate... accessibility is _so_ very important to society! while text-to-speech is _vital_ for blind people, i also think a lot of sighted people will come to appreciate it as well, so this is a very important arena to me, and i'd appreciate your help with it very much. think of it as your own private app! :+) for instance, i can program around that problem where accented letters are skipped, and any other glitches too, so the plain-text files, as they are, will be as useful to you as any daisy file would be. because at the rate books are being scanned these days, nobody is going to have enough time to mark 'em all up -- i'm not surprised the daisy people can't keep pace -- so we have to find a way to make plain-text shine... as you say, it's workable right now, in fact often it's the best choice available, but i know we can make it better... -bowerbird