

You will hear the text being read aloud.See step 7 of the How to enable Speak section, above, to see how to change the shortcut. Use the keyboard shortcut associated with Speak selection – the default shortcut is Option (alt) + Esc.Note: If you want to hear a whole page read aloud you don’t need to highlight it first. Select the text you would like to hear spoken.There are two ways to use Speak selection. When you have finished, click the Close (red) button in the top left corner of the System Preferences window.When you are happy with these settings, select OK.In the drop-down menu for Show controller, you can choose whether the controller appears automatically, never appears, or always appears. The controller allows you to speed up/slow down speech, jump to the next/previous sentence, pause speech, and stop speech. Show controller – when you activate Speak select using a keyboard shortcut, a controller appears on the screen.If you would prefer sentences are highlighted using a background colour, select the drop-down menu for Sentence style and choose Background Colour. The underline colour is black unless you changed the Sentence colour using the option shown above. Sentence style – by default, sentences are highlighted with a coloured underline.To change the highlight colour, select the drop-down menu for Word colour and choose from the options. Sentence colour – by default sentences are highlighted with a blue background.Word colour - by default, words are highlighted with a yellow background.You can customise how text is highlighted using the following settings.This will hopefully be fixed in a future macOS update. Another issue is that highlighting runs out of sync in some applications. For instance, content read aloud in Microsoft Word and the Chrome web browser doesn’t get highlighted. Note: Content highlighting only works in some applications. From the drop-down menu for Highlight Content, you can choose to have Words, Sentences, or both Words and Sentences highlighted. Highlight content – The selected text can be highlighted as it is being read aloud.To change the shortcut, select the box showing Option + Esc and type your new key combination. Keyboard shortcut – you can use a keyboard shortcut to activate Speak Selection.In the Options window, you can change the settings for:.To change the settings for Speak selection, select its corresponding Options button.In the right column, tick the checkbox for Speak selection.On the Accessibility screen, select Spoken Content from the left-hand column.On the System Preferences window, select the Accessibility icon.Select System Preferences from the menu.Select the Apple icon in the top left corner of the screen.

Using Speak selection How to enable Speak selection
