Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions. I've settled on TextAloud (asking Mike to read to me once in a while is working out -- and is excellent for help with proofreading).
I do have one other question, if you're still with me on this:
If I were to purchase a reader in one of the languages that have special characters (say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese), does the voice read from text written in those characters, or is a transliteration to something phonetic necessary.
For example, if I wished to have a paragraph from a newspaper written in Chinese read to me, could I take the paragraph directly from a Chinese newspaper?