On the powerful combo of Readability and the text-to-speech engine in Mac OS X
Unknown to many Mac OS X users is a capable text-to-speech engine that can be put to good use. I especially like to use it to read me articles or blog posts while I engage in work that occupies other parts of my brain. They’re akin to ad hoc podcasts or audio books.
However, text-to-speech does not alway prove convenient to use, often requiring you to manually select a portion of the page text to read — typically the article body. On complex pages this can be a hassle, especially those (like snopes) which disable selection.
To the rescue comes Readability, a talented Javascript program you can drag to your Bookmarks Bar to quickly isolate the body of the article or blog text. It’s great for reading (hence its apt name) and also proves ideal for text-to-speech.
To set up Readability, simply go to the site and drag the button to your Bookmarks Bar. (Note that you can tweak the text settings if you so choose.)
At this point, you can go to your article and click the ‘single page’ link. Once loaded, click ‘Readability’ on your Bookmarks Bar.
The article body text should format nicely in your browser.
To have your Mac read the article text, press command-A to select all text, then right-click > Speech > Start Speaking. Then you can go do other work while you listen to a text-to-speech rendering of the article with the Mac’s default settings
That’s all there is! But you can tweak things further. There are many voices available on the Mac, though ‘Alex’ appears to be the richest of all. (Read what Roger Ebert has said about Alex and the other voices.) You can configure them via ‘Speech’ preferences.
To avoid having to bring up the the context menu (via right click) you may wish to configure a key to start/stop reading the selected text. Here I configure Command-Option-S as my ‘speech key’.
Then to have my Mac read me an article is often as simple as clicking “Single Page” (where necessary), clicking “Readability” in the Bookmark Bar, pressing Command-A (to select all text) and then Command-Option-S (to start it reading)
If you’ve got any tips on this topic, I’m keen to hear them. Please add them to the comments.
