Can I convert a text file--presumably ASCII--to a format I can burn to and played on an ordinary CD?

Text files cannot be "played" on a CD, they can be burnt as data and accessed that way.
What are you trying to do ?

Elisha Grey, congrats on being able to operate the rating feature.
Now go back and reread what I wrote!!

First may I call your attention to guidelines for using the comments feature found here:

https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/feedback/using-comments-feature-24951.html

Since Ben's response was factually correct and asked for more help, your negative rating was uncalled for.

A regular text file cannot be converted to anything that can be played on a CD Player. However, what you can do is get a Text to Speech utility, that can take a plain text file, no matter where its stored and "read" it back. But not on a regular CD player. The only possibility I can think of is somehow recording what the computer reads as a WAV file that can then be burned to a CD.

Now there may be some tools I'm not aware of that may be able to do this. Your best resource for such a tool would be an organization that provides support for the blind.

Hi Elisha,

Like Scottgem, I am also unaware of any speech synthesisers that can export to wav or any other file that would be useful to you.

However I found this open source project:
Text2Speech - Home (http://text2speech.sourceforge.net/)

On their about page, they state that one of their aims for upcoming versions is to provide text to wav or mp3 capability. This may well be one to keep an eye on. The current version was released in November, so I assume that it is still being developed.

I agree, that blind services may know of something to help you out.

Hi Elisha,
There are quite a few shareware programs that advertise as being capable of this, text to speech to wav or mp3 -- though this is the only seemingly free one I was able to find:

http://www.geocities.com/bholio/t2w.html

Not sure about the quality, though it doesn't appear to cost anything.
Hope this helps. Take care. :)