I went for a walk to Walmart the other evening and decided to try listening to FreeRepublic. The iPhone (and probably Android) has a screen-reading feature which will read out the contents of the current web page. I brought up Safari with FreeRepublic, and then set it streaming to my headphones.
It actually worked pretty well. The text of each post was read almost flawlessly, usually with reasonable intonation.
The only problem is that the iPhone also read all the "metadata", including the post number and the Post Reply/Private Reply/To 1376/View Replies/Report Abuse items. Those felt very repetitive and useless after a short while. (I would want to keep the To/From data, however.) Nonetheless, it was easier to "peruse" the Q thread this way than to attempt to read the phone screen while walking. (Where are my VR glasses?)
I've tried to figure out how to get rid of the metadata lines, but that requires either a change to FR itself (not likely) or the insertion of user stylesheets on the iPhone (which doesn't seem to be possible yet). User stylesheets are available in Firefox on Android, however, so perhaps someone may want to try listening to FR on that platform.
When you do this, you'll probably want to go to My Account>My Preferences and set the browsing parameter to 250 comments so that you don't have to continually hit the next page link.
My computer has this feature too. I accidentally click it - drives took me a while to figure out how to shut it off.