The Distracting Selection
macOS includes a robust suite of Accessibility features designed to help users navigate their computers more easily. One of these features is “Spoken Content,” which allows the Mac to read text aloud. When this feature is active, macOS often automatically highlights the text (either word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence) as it speaks, usually with a bright yellow or blue background. While essential for visually impaired users or those using screen readers, if you have accidentally enabled a text-to-speech shortcut, this automatic highlighting can suddenly trigger while you are reading a webpage or typing a document, creating a highly distracting visual disruption.
Disabling Spoken Content Highlighting
To stop macOS from automatically highlighting text on your screen, you must dive into the Accessibility settings and disable the visual tracking associated with the Spoken Content feature.
Click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen and select System Settings. Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on Accessibility. In the main pane, under the “Vision” section, click on Spoken Content. Look for a setting labeled Highlight content (this may appear as a dropdown menu or an “Options” button depending on your exact version of macOS). If it is currently set to “Words,” “Sentences,” or “Words and Sentences,” the OS will highlight text whenever the speech engine is active. Click the dropdown menu and change the setting to Never. Alternatively, if you do not use the text-to-speech feature at all, you can simply toggle the main Speak selection switch at the top of the menu to the Off position, completely disabling the engine and its associated highlighting behavior.