Read Text Aloud from Any Screen Content on Mac
By Eduard Bruch, developer of Optic · Updated
A Mac can read selectable text aloud with its built-in speech features, but it cannot speak text that you cannot select, such as words inside an image or a video. The fix is to turn the on-screen text into real text first, then have the Mac speak it.
Short answer: for normal text, use macOS Speak Selection. For text in images, paused videos or screen shares, my pick is Optic, a menu bar app that copies the text in any area you drag across the screen and can read any capture aloud ($4.99, a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store).
Disclosure: I build Optic.
What macOS already does
macOS has spoken content features in System Settings under Accessibility. With Speak selection turned on, you select text in an app and the Mac reads it with one of its system voices. Many apps also offer a Speech option in the Edit menu or the right-click menu.
This works well when the text is selectable. It does not help when the text is part of an image, a scanned page shown as a picture, a frame of a video, or a meeting where someone shares their screen. There is nothing to select, so there is nothing to speak.
If the text is in an image you can open in Preview or Photos, try Live Text first: select the words in the image, then use Speak selection on them. Live Text works where Apple supports it: images in Preview, Photos, Quick Look and Safari. It does not work on arbitrary app windows, video calls or text drawn inside an app's interface.
Capture the text, then listen
Optic reads the screen inside a box you draw, turns what it sees into text on your Mac, and keeps each capture in its history. From the history, any capture can be read aloud with the macOS speech voices. The language is detected automatically, so a French capture is spoken with a French voice when one is available.
- Click the Optic icon in the menu bar.
- Choose Capture Text.
- Drag a box over the text you want to hear.
- Open the Optic menu again and choose read aloud on that capture in the history.
The text is also on your clipboard, so you can paste it anywhere with Command-V.
Good uses for it
Proofreading what you captured
OCR is good on clear text but can still misread a letter. Hearing the text spoken is an easy way to notice a word that looks almost right but sounds wrong.
Pronunciation of other languages
Optic recognizes 21 languages, including German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Capture a phrase from a slide or an image and listen to how a macOS voice pronounces it. Voice quality depends on the voices installed on your Mac.
Giving your eyes a break
A dense paragraph in a screenshot is easier to follow when you hear it. Capture it, then listen while you look at something else.
Where Optic does not fit
- It is not a screen reader. It reads aloud captures you made, not the whole screen or the app interface. For full spoken navigation, use VoiceOver, which is built into macOS.
- It does not open image or PDF files. Open them in Preview first so the text is on screen.
- It does not read whole documents in one go. You capture one area at a time.
- It does not translate. It speaks the text in the language it was written in.
- Handwriting is not a promised feature. Printed and on-screen text are what it is built for.
There is a closely related guide on text to speech from the screen, and a general one on copying text from anything on your screen. Two places it helps most: foreign-language text and long passages from a scanned PDF you cannot select.
FAQ
How do I make my Mac read text in an image aloud?
Turn the image text into real text first, with Live Text in Preview or Photos or with a screen OCR app like Optic, then use Speak selection or Optic's read aloud.
Which voice does Optic use?
It uses the speech voices that come with macOS and picks the language automatically from the captured text.
Does read aloud need the internet?
Optic has no network access. Recognition and speech both happen on your Mac with the voices macOS provides.
Can I replay something I captured earlier?
Yes. The history keeps your last 20 captures, and each one can be read aloud again or copied again.