If you suffer from severe eye strain after staring at a glowing monitor for eight hours a day, or if you simply prefer to absorb information audibly while cooking dinner or folding laundry, reading long articles on your computer can be exhausting. You might assume you need to purchase expensive, third-party text-to-speech software to solve this problem. In reality, Apple has integrated a highly advanced, built-in accessibility engine directly into macOS that can read any document, webpage, or email out loud using smooth, natural-sounding synthetic voices.
How to Enable Spoken Content
Before you can use the feature, you must activate the specific keyboard shortcut in your system preferences.
- Click the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen.
- Select System Settings from the drop-down menu.
- In the left-hand sidebar, scroll down and click on Accessibility.
- In the main window, look under the “Vision” section and click on Spoken Content.
- Locate the toggle switch labeled Speak selection and turn it ON.
Customizing the Voice
By default, the Mac might use a slightly robotic voice. You can drastically improve the quality by downloading Apple’s premium voices.
- Click the small Info (i) button next to the “Speak selection” toggle.
- Click the drop-down menu next to System voice.
- Select Manage Voices…
- Find a voice you like (such as “Samantha” or “Alex”) and click the download icon next to it to install the high-quality version.
- Click OK when you are finished.
How to Make the Mac Speak
The feature is now permanently active in the background of macOS.
To use it, open any webpage in Safari or any document in Pages. Use your mouse to highlight a paragraph of text. Then, press Option + Esc on your keyboard. Your Mac will instantly begin reading the exact text you highlighted out loud. To force the Mac to stop speaking early, simply press Option + Esc a second time.