Students’ Experience with Kurzweil Assistive Technology

In March 2025, the UX Team conducted interviews with eight students who were registered with Student Accessibility Services (SAS) to explore their use of Kurzweil and other assistive technologies. The library provides free access to Kurzweil for students registered with SAS. Yet despite high referrals and free access, there is fairly low use compared to the number of seats the library has purchased.

Research Questions:

• How do students use Kurzweil?
• Why do students use (or not use) Kurzweil?
• Is Kurzweil the best text-to-speech software for students?
• Should the library continue to offer Kurzweil, or is there a better option?

Method:

• Interviews

What did we learn?

• Students consider text-to-speech indispensable, and free access is crucial, but Kurzweil has notable usability issues.
• Most students rely mainly on basic text-to-speech functions and seldom use advanced features.
• The documentation is overlooked or unhelpful, and students appreciate staff support for installation.
• Kurzweil works well for long PDFs, offline use, and academic reading.
• Students report poor mobile compatibility, glitches, robotic voice, difficulty with scientific content, and challenges with Word documents and Courselink.
• Students are not necessary using Kurzweil because it is the best text-to-speech option, but because it’s the one the university offers for free.

Recommendations

• The library should continue to provide access to free text-to-speech software. It is critical for students to succeed in their courses.
• The library must stay current with emerging text-to-speech technologies and explore the possibility of offering something more flexible and up-to-date.
• As long as the university continues to purchase so many Kurzweil seats, it makes sense to offer it to all students.