Make Your Mac Read Text Aloud With a Keyboard Shortcut

Buried in Accessibility settings is one of the Mac's most useful everyday features: select any text — an article, an email, your own draft — press Option+Esc, and the Mac reads it to you. It takes one toggle to enable and works in nearly every app on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Turn it on

1. Open System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content.
2. Turn on Speak selection.
3. Select some text anywhere and press Option+Esc. The Mac starts reading; press Option+Esc again to stop.

That's the whole setup. It works in Safari, Mail, Notes, PDFs in Preview, and most third-party apps — anywhere text can be selected. If nothing is selected when you press the shortcut, many apps will speak from the current position or read the visible text instead.

To undo, flip Speak selection back off — the shortcut goes dormant with it.

Customize the shortcut and behavior

Click the ⓘ button next to Speak selection and a sheet of options opens:

• Keyboard shortcut — click the field and press a new combo if Option+Esc clashes with something you use.
• Highlight content — highlights words, sentences, or both as they're spoken, karaoke-style. Excellent for proofreading and for following along in long articles.
• Show controller — set it to appear automatically and you get a small floating panel with play/pause, skip forward and back by sentence, and a speed control. Worth enabling for anything longer than a paragraph.

Make it sound good

The default voice is fine; the downloadable ones are much better. In the same Spoken Content pane:

• System voice — pick a different voice, or choose Manage Voices… to download higher-quality ones. The premium and Siri voices are large downloads but dramatically more natural for long listening.
• Speaking rate — most people find the default slow once they're used to the feature. Nudge it up; you can also adjust speed live from the floating controller.

Voice and rate here also apply to the Mac's other spoken announcements, so consider it your Mac's whole voice, not just this feature's.

What to actually use it for

Two habits make this feature stick. First, proofreading: your eyes skip over your own typos, but your ears don't — selecting your draft and hearing it read back catches missing words, doubled words, and clunky sentences faster than rereading. Second, listening while doing something else: select a long article, hit the shortcut, and let it play while you tidy your desk or eat lunch. With the sentence-skip controls on the floating controller, it's a serviceable read-it-later system with zero extra software.

If you want the reverse — talking instead of typing — that's a separate feature: Dictation, with its own setup and shortcut.

How this differs from VoiceOver

Don't confuse Speak selection with VoiceOver, the Mac's full screen reader. VoiceOver narrates the entire interface — buttons, menus, focus changes — and takes over significant keyboard behavior; it's a complete interaction mode designed for blind and low-vision users. Speak selection is the lightweight sibling: it only speaks when asked, only speaks what you selected, and changes nothing else about how the Mac works. If you ever enable VoiceOver by accident (its shortcut is Cmd+F5) and the Mac starts describing everything you touch, press Cmd+F5 again to turn it off — Speak selection will still be there, quietly waiting for its own shortcut. The same Spoken Content pane also offers Speak announcements, which reads alerts and app notifications aloud — useful, but a separate toggle with a separate temperament.

Go deeper on text-to-speech

Speak selection is one of several ways the Mac can read to you — including speaking whole documents and announcing alerts. See how to make your Mac read text aloud for the full tour.