How To Have Your Mac Speak Text To You

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you several different ways that your Mac can speak text to you. [music] 

Sometimes it would be nice to have your Mac actually just speak text out loud to you rather than having to read it on the screen. Perhaps you want to sit back and enjoy listening to an article instead of reading it or perhaps reading it on the screen isn't an option for you. 

The first way is the simplest. That's just use a menu command. So it is best to start off by selecting some text so it will only speak that selection to you. Then you just want to go to the Edit Menu and you'll find a Speech item here. There are to submenu items in it, Start Speaking and Stop Speaking. Select Start Speaking and it will speak the selected text (computer speaking The James Webb Space Telescope......). If you have it speak a longer passage it will keep going. But you can go to Edit and then Speech, Stop Speaking to interrupt it.

Now you can also use the Context Menu to do this which in a lot of cases is easier than going to the Menu Bar. So, you select some text like before. But now you're going to Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad to bring up the Context Menu. You'll find Speech here as well and you can Start Speaking and Stop Speaking.

Now if you don't have any text selected it's going to try to read the entire page to you. That includes lots of buttons and other controls. So you probably don't want to do this, especially with a webpage (computer speaking). But a better option is to switch into Reader Mode. You can do it with this button up here or you can go to View, Show Reader. This tries to isolate just the article part of the webpage you're looking at. Then if you ask it just to speak from here all it has is the headline and article which will be a lot better. Now I'll go to Speech, Start Speaking (computer speaking The James Webb Space Telescope.........). It's going to keep going until you use the Stop Speaking command. It's also often a lot easier to select text once you're in Reader View as well and then use the Menu Bar or the Context Menu to have it start speaking. 

Now whether you use the Menu Bar or the Context Menu it's a little hard to have it start and stop speaking. But you can assign keyboard shortcuts to these menu commands to make it easier. So I'm going to go into System Settings and then I'm going to go to Keyboard and I'm going to go to Keyboard Shortcuts, a button there. Then I'm going to go to App Shortcuts, which is where you can add custom shortcuts. I'm going to click the Plus Button here. I'm going to stick with All Applications, so I can use this everywhere. I'm going to type the Menu Title. It has to be exactly what the menu title is, which is Start Speaking. Then I'm going to assign a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to Option Command and S. Then I'm going to do another one for Stop Speaking. For that I'm going to use Shift Option Command S. Then I can see those both listed under All Applications here. 

So now when I'm back in Safari I should check in the Edit Menu under Speech to make sure that I typed the names of those Menu Items correctly. I should see the Keyboard Shortcuts here if I did. Now I can use the Keyboard Shortcut to both start, (computer the James Webb Space) and Stop Speaking.

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Now there's a lot you can change about how this sounds. You'll find those settings in System Settings as well. They are under Accessibility even though we haven't really been using an Accessibility feature. You go to Read & Speak. You'll see System Voice here. This is where you can change the voice that is used. You'll get more options if you click the i button here and then you click Voice at the top. Now you can see all the voices, preview them, and download new ones that you don't have on your Mac yet. You also have the options here for Rate, Pitch, and Volume. You can adjust those as you like. 

Now that's just one way to have text spoken to you. Another way is to use a special Accessibility feature. So, we're going to go into System Settings again and we're going to go to Accessibility and then back to that same place, Read & Speak. But we're going to look this time at Speak Selection. I'm going to turn it on and then I'm going to click the i button next to it and here I can customize a lot of things about this feature. The first thing I can customize is the Keyboard Shortcut. Option Escape is the default but you can switch it to whatever you want. You can also change how content is highlighted on the screen because it's going to show you what word is being read as it is being read. So you can have it be whole words or sentences or turn this feature off. You can set the word color or sentence color. You can have it underlined instead of highlighted. You can have this controller that is showing Automatically, Never, or Always. I'll leave it as Automatically so it only shows when we're using this feature. 

So now that I've set all that up I can select some text again. I'll select this whole first paragraph here. I will use Option Escape to have it start speaking. You can see the highlight there of the words. The controls allow me to Pause and Resume. I can move these controls around and dismiss them. I can change the speed by clicking here and have it go at different speeds. I can jump back or forward or just stop altogether. You can see the Controller was only there while it was doing it. So I can go into System Settings and then back to that same place, Read & Speak, and then I can have the Controller Always be on. In that case I have the Controller there so I don't even have to use the Keyboard Shortcut anymore. I can select some text, like this, and then just press Play. 

So this is a much more advanced feature but it is just as easy to use as the Menu Command. But there is one more way to do it that I want to show you. Let's go back here into System Settings again and Accessibility and Read & Speak. Here you'll find the Accessibility Reader. I'm going to turn Off Speak Selection and instead turn On Accessibility Reader. I'm going to look at the options and the most important one here is the Keyboard Shortcut. In this case Command Escape, rather than Option Escape, for Speak Selection. I can also select whether or not it autoplays. So starts speaking immediately or waits for further instructions once I invoke the Accessibility Reader. So with Accessibility Reader you don't select text. It doesn't matter what's actually selected. When you use Command Escape it will bring up Accessibility Reader with the Content that's displayed in the App you're using. In this case, this webpage, which is going to include all this navigation and controls and everything before it even gets to the article. So you probably don't want to use it quite like that. 

If you're looking at a webpage you probably first want to go to Reader View, like that, and then bring up Accessibility Reader. Now it will just display the article. If you're viewing a PDF in Preview or you're working with a document in Pages you don't need to do that, of course. It should just bring up the Content that's there in that document. So now here in the Accessibility Reader I get some different things. One is I get a Controller here at the top that shows me a time. I can play this just like I'm playing a bit of audio. So I can Play and you could see how it starts speaking and it highlights the text. I can Stop. I can jump back or forward. I can click here to change the speed  and I can click here and actually change lot about what's shown, including the text color, the background color, the font used, spacing, and everything. So this is really meant not just for hearing the text spoken to you but actually seeing it at the same time that it is being read to you. It's a really cool advanced way to have text spoken to you on a Mac. 

There are three really good options for having text spoken to you using built-in macOS functionality. You can use the very simple straight forward Menu Commands or assign a keyboard shortcut to it. You can use Speech Selection to have a slightly more advanced way of doing it with a Controller. Or you can use the Accessibility Reader for a very advanced way of viewing and hearing the text spoken to you at the same time. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.