Google Chrome has integrated a text-to-speech feature directly into its primary interface. If you right-click on an article or highlight a block of text, you will see an option labelled “Listen to this page” or “Read Aloud.” Selecting it summons a large media player interface at the top of your browser that begins speaking the text using an AI voice.
While excellent for accessibility, many power users find the prominent placement of this feature in the right-click context menu annoying, especially if they never use text-to-speech or already utilize a dedicated, superior screen reader extension. If you want to clean up your context menu, you can disable the built-in reading tool.
How to Remove the “Listen to this page” Option in Chrome
You must dive into Chrome’s hidden “Experiments” menu to disable the native read-aloud functionality.
- Open the Google Chrome browser.
- Click inside the address bar at the top of the screen.
- Type the following exact command and press Enter:
chrome://flags/#read-aloud - The browser will load the Experiments page, automatically scrolling down to highlight the Read Aloud setting in yellow.
- Click the drop-down menu on the right side of the highlighted setting (which currently says “Default”).
- Select Disabled from the drop-down list.
- A large blue Relaunch button will appear at the bottom right of the window. Click it to restart Chrome.
When the browser restarts, right-click on any paragraph of text on a website. The “Listen to this page” option will be completely scrubbed from the context menu, streamlining your right-click options and preventing accidental text-to-speech activations.