If you’ve ever read a public information leaflet – from your doctor or dentist, social services or a local law firm – and tripped over some of the words they use, or found the sentences too long and windy to make sense of. That.

Or maybe you’re sitting there in a waiting room with a leaflet in your hands but you forgot your reading glasses? That too.

Perhaps you’re visually impaired; you can make out large-ish shapes on a page but not the writing. Or you have a specific reading difficulty or an intellectual disability and you just can’t read well enough for it to make any sense.

Well, here you are with something very personal to you that a stranger – or worse, your dad or your nine year old daughter – is going to read out loud to you. How does that feel? My best guess is not at all good. Embarrassing, demeaning, belittling at best; leaving you nakedly exposed and stripped of your privacy, your dignity. At worst, information that makes you vulnerable is given to you by the person who will exploit it.

So what if you could have it read to you in such a way that no one could tell you weren’t reading it yourself? A personal reader coming to you via ear-buds on your smart device? This is about to be demonstrated in a new anthology where short stories and poems are accompanied by voice files you can access directly from the printed page. The technology is simple, it could be applied to anything, and it could make loss of confidentiality, loss of dignity, loss of confidence with tricky words, a thing of the past. At the very least, it might put a stop to those unwieldy paragraphs that whoever wrote them never once had to read as a lay person, and you may suddenly discover that even experts fall over endocrinological if they have to say it too often!

The book will be out soon and when it is, the technique it uses will be seem completely obvious. I’ll post the details here then it’s over to you – tell your health professionals, your local councils, your solicitors’ offices, your libraries, that you want them to equip their leaflets with a Personal Reader so that you can make full use of the information they want you to have.

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Readalongreads is not a commercial organisation. It sells nothing but will host a limited number of voice files free of charge for small enterprises wanting to try out the technique before setting up their own hosting platform.