Optical character recognition is not really an option here since most of it requires that the document be typed.

I’ve heard of one or two that’s the exception. And can read handwriting.

Mostly those has to be transcribed, which may cost you something unless you can find family or friends who would help you do it for free. Unfortunately some of these options may mean that other people get to read your private journaling.

I know university libraries will make physical books accessible for students with a print disability by cutting off the binding, scanning the whole thing into some digital format, the rebinding the book again after. Not that that this is an option for you but you could DIY that process or have someone help with it. Places like Kinkos or other kinds of print shops, they are set up to cut bindings off of catalogues to change them to a ring bound style. Meaning, they can cut the bindings off journals no problemo. Sounds kind of painstaking, but presumably the number of journals is finite. Then yeah, the whole handwriting thing., not sure.

I believe there are programs that can scan documents and convert it to a standard font, but that also requires fairly legible handwriting, and it still has errors. Then you would need some sort of screen reader and convert that to an audio file. So it wouldnt exactly be easy, but it could be done. The other way would be to pay someone to transcribe them for you.

 
Edit: I think someone would love to transcribe something like that. Like a writer, or an artist, or some sort of psychology major type person.

The Rocketbook app is specifically designed to read and convert handwriting to text. I used it for journaling and saving all sorts of handwritten notes. The accuracy is dependent on how legible the person’s handwriting is. Mine is not so legible so I got mediocre results unless I really paid attention to my penmanship. Very clear print would get me 99% accuracy while my typical cursive and print chicken scratch got me about 75%. It’s free to try on any document you can frame with some fluorescent orange triangles or you can buy some of their beacons. I made my own with an orange highlighter. It integrates well with Evernote, OneNote, Dropbox and lots of other note taking or doc storage apps.

Apple also has great handwriting recognition build into their iPads but I haven’t found an app that harnesses that technology for scanned documents yet. Stuff I write with Apple Pencil is super accurate even with my terrible penmanship.

If it is private information... I guess get someone they really trust, to help them.
Maybe a counselor or someone contractually obligated to neger utter a single private word.

Use be my eyes to read the text on the journals while you record what they read. They are strangers across the nation or world, so your privacy and anonymity would be alright, unless you wrote your name, phone, and address all over the journal.

For typed text, Kurzweil and things like that might have worked. But for handwriting, try one of these newer Mobile apps, Seeing AI or Lookout.