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How to make your Mac read text for you

Posted on Nov 12, 2008 in Mac | 9 comments

If you’re tired reading, or you’ve been a long time at the computer and your eyes hurt you’ll find convenient to sit back and relax and let your MacBook (or any mac powered pc) to read the selected text for you out loud.

How does it work?

You can make your mac read any text from anywhere. Even if it’s online on your favorite blog, or offline on your local hard as a PDF book or simple text file.

You have to select the text that you want your Mac to read for you with your mouse and then press a combination key set by you and your MacBook will start reading the text for you.

How to set combination key?

Open up System Preferences and go to Speech, then use the second tab called Text to Speech. You can select then your voice for the speech (I use Alex, most realistic voice) and then check the “Speak the selected text when the key is pressed“. After that you’ll need to setup your key combination. Press “Set keys” and hold down on your keyboard the combination of keys that you desire (be sure not to add some combinations that are already in use by some other shortcuts). I personally use ctrl+command+s and works like a charm.

That’s it, you’re done! Give it a try and read the post from here and see how nice it is to listen to your Mac.

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http://www.nicolascamacho.com nicolas

I´m following the instructions… but don´t work.
http://www.Garcya.us Garcya

What exactly doesn’t work ?!
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Thanks for the tip………I tried it on my Mac and it works fine……its fun to have your Mac talk !
http://www.Garcya.us Garcya

Awesome, yes. I use it to make my mac read for me when I’m not in the mood to look on the screen. Pretty cool :D
luis

i cant make it stop reading text to me, and i cant turn the volume up or down how do i make it stop?
court

so this isn’t working for me. I’ve gone through every option possible, and it doesn’t allow me to set up a key combination to press for it to read to me.
sandy tea

THANKKK YOU!!
http://twitter.com/njcomputer NJ Computer Repair

Great Mac text to speech tutorial. Thank you!
Bzmouse

Hi, this is such an old thread from 08 but I am looking for exactly this … how to make my macbook pro read files to me like from PDF or the alike – some of my documents I want read are best viewed in the preview but when I had that read to me it read the code for example, %7$00%, and not what the text actually said. so I thought, no problem I opened the same file in a PDF but the same thing happened. Do you know to fix this?