Text-to-Speech Software Support Guide

The Windows Text to Speech option is called Narrator. You have to turn this Ease of Access feature on from Settings or the Control Panel. See this guide for a comprehensive walkthrough of the built-in Narrator Text-to-Speech features in Windows.

Narrator is switched off by default in Windows. Follow these steps to enable it.

• Select the Start button and choose Settings.
• Go to Settings > Ease of Access > Narrator.
• Enable Narrator by toggling the button to the On position.
• A Narrator dialog box will appear on the screen explaining keyboard layout changes. The blue border around the text highlights the parts read by Narrator.
  
• Select OK to stop the message narration and exit the dialog. Also, check the box next to “Don’t show again” if you don’t want the box to appear every time Narrator starts.
• A “Welcome to Narrator” screen will appear when you start using Narrator for the first time. From here, you can learn how to use the screen reader and find related learning resources like the comprehensive Narrator guide available online.

Mac OS has many powerful accessibility features built into its OS. See this article for full info on enabling and customising Text to Speech features on your Mac computer.

To listen to spoken text:

1. On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > System Settings, then click Accessibility in the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down.)
2. Click Spoken Content on the right.
3. Turn on “Speak selection”.
4. 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 onscreen when your Mac starts speaking. Use the controller to change the speaking rate, move forwards or backwards one sentence in the text, pause and resume speaking, or stop speaking.
   Note: If no text items are available, a beep sound plays.
5. To stop the speaking, press the keyboard shortcut again.

For a thorough walkthrough of the built-in Text-to-Speech features in iOS, see these Apple Support articles:

• Hear iPad speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback
• Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback

How to adjust the speech settings

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
2. Adjust any of the following:
   • Speak Selection: To hear text you selected, tap the Speak button.
   • Speak Screen: To hear the entire screen, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.
   • Speech Controller: Show the controller for quick access to Speak Screen and Speak on Touch.

See this Android Support article for a thorough walkthrough of the built-in Text-to-Speech features in Android.

With text-to-speech, your device can convert text input and play audio aloud.

Update text-to-speech settings

1. Open your device settings .
2. Select Accessibility > text-to-speech output.
3. Choose your preferred engine, language, speech rate and pitch.
   • The default text-to-speech engine choices vary by device. Options can include Google’s text-to-speech engine, the device manufacturer’s engine and any third-party text-to-speech engines that you’ve downloaded from the Google Play Store.

Tip: To hear a short demonstration of speech synthesis, press Play.

“Speak” is a feature that’s built into all Microsoft Office apps, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. You can use Speak to have text read aloud in any document.

See this Microsoft support article for a full overview of the Speak feature and how to use it:
Microsoft: Use the Speak text-to-speech feature to read text aloud

You’ll first have to open your settings and add the Speak command to your Quick Access Toolbar. After you have added the Speak command to your Quick Access Toolbar, you can hear single words or blocks of text read aloud by selecting the text you want to hear and then clicking the Speak icon on the Quick Access Toolbar.

You can download Acrobat Reader for your computer here: https://get.adobe.com/reader

Note: Adobe offers multiple versions of Acrobat. Acrobat Reader is a free app, while Acrobat Pro is a paid app with an expanded set of features. Acrobat Reader has all the TTS features you’ll need to hear your PDF spoken aloud. 

Once you’ve opened a PDF in Acrobat Reader, to enable Read Aloud:

• On the View menu, choose Read Out Loud > Activate Read Out Loud.
• Again go to View > Read Out Loud and then choose an appropriate option for reading:
• To read the current page, choose Read This Page Only.

To read the entire document, choose Read To End of Document.

You can download Acrobat Reader for free through the Google Play Store.

Once you’ve opened a PDF in Acrobat Reader, to enable Read Aloud:

• On the menu bar at the top of the screen, you will see an icon on the upper right corner that’s three vertical dots. When you click that icon, you’ll see the document info.
• Next to the document title, you’ll see a headphone icon. Click the headphone icon to activate the Read Aloud feature. 
• When Read Aloud is activated, you’ll see the play controls on the bottom of the screen. You can adjust the reading speed here, and navigate the document elements with the advance/rewind buttons.

You can download Acrobat Reader for free through the App Store.

To use TTS  on your iPhone/iPad, you’ll use iOS’s built-in Accessibility features to read the PDF aloud. (See this walkthrough for screenshots of every step below.)

Use Speak Selection

With the Speak Selection feature, you can make Acrobat Reader app read the selected text to you out loud. To use the Speak feature, you need to enable Speak Selection in the device settings. To do so:

1. Go to device Settings.
2. Tap Accessibility > Spoken Content.
3. Toggle the Speak Selection button to turn it on.

To use the Speak Selection feature in Acrobat:

1. Open a PDF.
2. Select the text that you want the app to read out loud.
3. From the popover menu bar that appears, select Speak. It starts reading the selected text out loud and the popover menu bar now displays a Pause button instead of Speak.

For a PDF to be able to be read by TTS software, it has to be scanned using optical character recognition (OCR). We make every effort to provide students with TTS-compatible PDFs in your learning materials, but you may occasionally come across a PDF that isn’t able to be read by your TTS software. In these (rare) cases, it’s likely that the document wasn’t scanned using OCR. One simple solution for “converting” a PDF is to open it in Google docs. Google Docs will convert the text to make it readable.

• Open Google Docs
• Import the PDF and Open it in Google docs.
• You can now export the document as  PDF under File > Download as a PDF.
• When you open this version of the PDF in Acrobat, you’ll be able to use Read Aloud.