Text to Speech from Any Screen Content on Mac

Your Mac can already read selected text aloud; the trouble is text you cannot select, like words inside images, video frames or scanned pages. The fix is to turn that text into real text with OCR first, then let the Mac's speech voices read it.

Short answer: for selectable text, use the built-in Speak Selection feature in macOS. For text in images and other places you cannot select, my pick is Optic, a menu bar app that copies the text in any area you drag across the screen ($4.99, a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store) and can read any capture aloud.

Disclosure: I build Optic.

What macOS already does

macOS has spoken content built in. Turn on Speak Selection in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content, select text in Safari, Mail, Pages or most other apps, and your Mac reads it. VoiceOver, the full screen reader, is there too. For normal text, start here; it costs nothing.

Live Text also helps: it works where Apple supports it, which includes images in Preview, Photos, Quick Look and Safari, and paused video frames in some players. It does not work on arbitrary app windows, video calls or UI text. If Live Text can select the words in an image, you can then have the Mac speak the selection.

The gap: text you cannot select

A lot of on-screen text is really part of an image: an infographic, a scanned letter without a text layer, subtitles burned into a video, text in a remote desktop window, labels drawn by an app. You can read it with your eyes, but there is nothing to select, so there is nothing for the speech feature to read.

Capture and listen with Optic

Optic reads the text from the screen and keeps it in a history you can play back.

1. Show the text on screen.
2. Click the Optic icon in the menu bar and choose Capture Text.
3. Drag a box over the text.
4. Open Optic from the menu bar again; your capture is at the top of the history. Choose read aloud on that entry.

The text is spoken with the macOS speech voices, and Optic detects the language automatically. The text is also on your clipboard, so you can paste it with Command-V if you want to keep it.

The history holds your last 20 captures, each with a small thumbnail and the time, so you can replay a passage or listen to an earlier one again. Everything stays on the Mac: recognition runs locally and the app has no network access.

Where this helps

• Proofreading OCR output. Hearing the captured text makes misread words easier to notice than reading it.
• Text in images and slides. Listen to the text of a chart, poster or slide that only exists as an image.
• Foreign language text. Optic recognizes 21 languages, and the voice follows the detected language, which helps when you want to hear how a captured sentence sounds. See OCR foreign language text on Mac.
• Reading breaks. Capture a paragraph from a scan and listen to it instead of reading small print.

Where Optic does not fit

• It is not a screen reader. Optic does not replace VoiceOver or describe the interface. It reads the text in the area you capture, when you ask.
• No continuous reading. It does not follow along a document; each passage is one capture.
• No file import. It does not open image or PDF files; show them on screen first.
• No whole-document OCR or batch. For a full book scan, a document OCR tool fits better.
• Handwriting. Not a feature; do not count on it.

More on this topic: read text aloud from the screen on Mac.

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 with a screen OCR app like Optic, then use Speak Selection or Optic's read aloud on the capture.

Can a Mac read text from a video aloud?

Pause the video, capture the on-screen text with Optic, and choose read aloud on that capture in the history.

Which voices does Optic use?

It uses the speech voices installed in macOS and picks the language automatically.

Does reading aloud need an internet connection?

Optic itself needs none: recognition and the history are local, and the app has no network access.

Get Optic on the Mac App Store · All Optic facts. Optic needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. For other uses, see how to copy text from the screen on Mac.