Always liked spoken dialog myself, just brings a little something more to the game world when actually hearing people / things interact with you.
I remember the first time I heard spoken dialog in an RPG, I was playing Ancient Land of Y's on my Turbo Graphics 16 Console back in the day and not all dialog was spoken, but got to one point in the game and the NPC portrait came up, with dialog, then I heard the voice bit come in I had an eargasm from super awesome coolness.
As far as reading text ingame, it can be very distressing at times depending on the font, the background, and amount of text. The fairly recent "Inquisitor" RPG is a perfect example of text that make your eyes scream.
