This post will show how you can turn on VoiceOver Screen Reader on Mac to help someone who is visually impaired.

All rights reserved.VoiceOver is available as a native app on your Mac. There are a few shortcomings (you can’t choose the voice, you can’t do Select All in iBooks or Safari, and you can’t trigger it from Siri), but even so, Speak Selection is worth exploring.Ĭopyright 2008-2023 Christian Boyce. You can click the Play button to hear a sample sentence. Try the various voices, and try adjusting the rate to hear how things sound. In the Speech section, switch to the Text to Speech section and you’ll be given the option to chance voices. The way you do it is you go to the Apple menu, then to System Preferences, then to Speech. The voices on the Mac are far better, and far more configurable, than the ones on the iPhone and iPad. Very handy, by the way, to have your writing read back to you.įinally, let’s have a look at the voice itself, and how you can control it. You may need to experiment with this a bit but it’s worth it. Some programs require you to select the text, then control-click on it to reveal a “Speech/Start Speaking” pop-up menu item. Not all programs can read out loud the way Mail and Safari can, and of the ones the can, not all do it via Edit/Speech/Start Speaking. The button disappears if Safari doesn’t think it can figure out what the story is.) Use it any time you want to hide a web page’s clutter and focus on the story. (Reader is worth knowing about even if you’re not going to have the page read to you out loud. Here’s what it looks like:Ĭlick it again to make Reader go away. Swtich to “Reader” mode by clicking the gray Reader button in the address bar. Nice and neat! No distractions! Plus, if you do Command-A here, you’ll get just the story. It turns a web page like the one above into a web page like the one below. And, it prevents you from selecting just the story when you do a Select All because all of the other stuff gets selected too. There’s a story in there but there’s a lot of other junk there too.

Here’s an example.įirst, here’s a web page.

Reader hides “web junk” and leaves you with nothing but the article. If you use Safari’s “Reader” feature, you’ll have an easier time selecting the text you want. It’s exactly the same as Mail: Edit/Speech/Start Speaking. Safari will also read out loud any selected text. So, if you get a long email, click in the body of it, do a Select All (or Command-A), and then go to Edit/Speech/Start Speaking. Mail will read out loud any selected text. Note: here’s a link to my article about making your iPhone and iPad read out loud. As promised, here’s how to make your Mac read out loud to you.

Read text out loud mac