

#Hot key for text to speach on mac mac#
If you have been a Mac user for some time, you would be aware (or might have stumbled upon) the Dictation feature. Since some of the Accessibility features on Mac, such as Voice Over, Zoom, Voice Control, and Speech can also come in handy for those looking to get more out of their actions, and in turn, their device. However, that is not to say that normal users cannot benefit from these features. Accessibility features, essentially, are features that aid people with disabilities to better use certain functionalities to allow them to operate their devices independently. Speak screen is something that could come in handy for reading ebooks or even written content on the web, like some of our articles.In case you are unaware, Apple provides a range of Accessibility features on Mac - especially with the recent versions of macOS. Plus, iOS devices have an extension of this feature called “Speak Screen”, which as the name suggests, reads out whatever that’s displayed on the screen. If you liked using this feature on your Mac, you might be interested in learning how you can use speak selection on iPhone and iPad too, provided you have one. This feature could be also used to check the pronunciation of certain words that you’re not familiar with, without having to look it up on YouTube or elsewhere. One handy trick for multitasking is this example, you could select a long email on your Mac and use Speak Selection to read it out loud. This feature could prove to be extremely useful for multitaskers, or for accessibility reasons, whether your eyesight is not perfect or you find some onscreen text simply too small, or unreadable. Note that the settings precise names are slightly different in various releases of macOS, eg “Speech” vs “Spoken Content”, but the setting and functionality itself is the same regardless. It’s pretty easy to get your Mac to speak the highlighted text, as you can see. Alternatively, you can right-click on the highlighted text, click on “Speech” and choose “Start Speaking”, or pull down the “Edit” menu and choose Speech from there.

By default, you can activate this feature by simultaneously pressing Option and Esc keys. Check the box to speak selected text when the key is pressed. Now, you’ll find the option to enable speak selection on your Mac.Here, choose “Speech” or “Spoken Content” from the left pane, as shown below.

Click on “Accessibility” to proceed further.
