Make your Mac read text aloud.

1. Open the Apple menu and choose System Settings.
2. Click Accessibility in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down.
3. Click Read & Speak. On macOS 15 Sequoia, this is called Spoken Content.
4. Turn on Speak selection.

You only need to do this once.

1. Select the text you want to hear.
2. Press ⌥ Esc (Option-Esc).
3. Press ⌥ Esc again to stop.

A small controller shows while your Mac reads. Use it to change the speed, skip a sentence, or pause.

1. In Read & Speak, click the Info button (ⓘ) next to Speak selection.
2. In the Highlight content menu, choose words, sentences, or both.
3. Pick the colors you like, then click OK.

In the same window, you can also change the keyboard shortcut and choose when the controller shows.

Live Text in macOS lets you select words in a photo or screenshot. Open the picture in Preview or Photos, select the words, then press ⌥ Esc. This works only in apps that support Live Text. How to read text in images and screenshots aloud covers other ways.

Speak Selection works well for a paragraph or two. Longer reading is harder:

• Many of the built-in voices sound robotic and flat, which gets tiring over a long article or chapter.
• It reads only what you select. To hear a web article without the ads, menus, and unrelated text, you have to select just the article yourself.
• It reads only text you can select, or text in apps with Live Text.
• It doesn’t turn the pages of a book or a long document for you.
• It doesn’t keep a list of what you read, so you can’t come back later and continue.
• You can’t click a word to start reading from there.

Computer Reads Pretty is a text to speech app for Mac made for longer reading. It reads websites, books, documents, Discord chats, and text in pictures. Its Safari extension reads the article and skips the ads and unrelated text. Each word lights up as it’s read, and the natural voices run on your Mac.