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Have your Mac speak text that’s on the screen
If you have trouble reading text on your screen, you can have your Mac speak text whenever you press a keyboard shortcut. You can customise the keyboard shortcut and set other options—for example, you can choose to show an on-screen controller that lets you easily change the speaking rate, stop speaking and more.
![The on-screen controller that can be shown when your Mac speaks selected text. The controller provides six buttons which, from left to right, let you decrease the speaking rate, skip back one sentence, play or pause the speaking, stop the speaking, skip forward one sentence and increase the speaking rate. The name of the app is shown at the top of the controller.](https://help.apple.com/assets/605932B4A1B7A93F492858E8/605932C0A1B7A93F492858FF/en_AU/683f3a47f6986c6e82ded00d4afa90a3.png)
Listen to spoken text
On your Mac, press the specified keyboard shortcut (the default key combination is Option-Esc).
If text is selected when you press the keyboard shortcut, the selected text is spoken. Otherwise, available text items in the current window are spoken; for example, if Mail is the current window, an email message is read.
If you set the option to automatically show the controller, it appears on-screen when your Mac starts speaking. Use the controller to change the speaking rate, move forward or backward one sentence in the text, pause and resume speaking or stop speaking.
Note: If no text items are available, you hear a beep.
To stop the speaking, press the key again.
Customise how spoken text appears on the screen
On your Mac, choose Apple menu
> System Preferences, click Accessibility, then click Spoken Content.Select the “Speak selection” tick box.
By default, your Mac speaks text when you press the keyboard shortcut Option-Esc. To set a different keyboard shortcut and change other settings, click Options:
Keyboard shortcuts: Press the key combination you want to use. For example, press the Option and Tab keys together to set the keyboard shortcut as Option+Tab.
Highlight content: Click the pop-up menu, then choose to have words, sentences or both highlighted as your Mac speaks. Click the “Word colour” and “Sentence colour” pop-up menus to choose the highlight colour.
If you don’t want spoken content highlighted, choose Never from the “Highlight content” pop-up menu.
Sentence style: Click the pop-up menu to have spoken sentences indicated by an underline or with a background colour).
Show controller: Click the pop-up menu to choose to automatically show the controller when you press the keyboard shortcut or to never or always show it.
The controller is especially useful when your Mac is reading long pieces of text. You can use the controller to pause, resume or stop the speaking, change the speaking rate and skip ahead or backward in the text.
When you’re done choosing options, click OK.
To turn off this feature, de-select the “Speak selection” tick box.
You can also use VoiceOver, the spoken interface for macOS, to hear descriptions of every item on the screen and to control your Mac using the keyboard. See the VoiceOver User Guide.