Here's a thing. Send an email to britspeech@robobraille.org with a text attachment. The email doesn't need to contain any sort of message and the text can be any Word document you have to hand. Wait for a few minutes and you'll get an email back with your attachment being read aloud to you by a synthetic voice. It'll be in an MP3 format so you can play it back on your MP3 player, computer, or whatever. The voice isn't brilliant, and the software can get tripped up by a lot of text boxes and elaborate formatting, but generally the system works extremely well. The implications here are quite significant. If you download a handout from the MLE, or from anywhere else on the web, come to that, you can simply send it off to RoboBraille and then listen to it at your convenience. If you don't want to read it, but you do want it read to you, then that's just what this system offers.
You can find out more about this at the RoboBraille Site, and it's worth exploring. Putting a "+" in the subject line of your email will make it play faster, for example, while putting "++" will make it play faster still. It doesn't just handle Word files either - it'll accept pdf, rtf or just plain text files. Well worth giving it a try!