Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show
you how to use the Spoken Content Accessibility features on your Mac.
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Now there are a variety of features on your Mac that will read things out loud to you rather
than having you read the text on your screen. Chances are just about any user can find some
of these useful. To find Spoken Content features go to System Preferences and then Accessibility.
Then look for Spoken Content. There are four main types of spoken content accessibility features.
But before we get into those let's look at the different voices you can use. Since things are
going to be spoken out loud you get to choose the voices. You'll have a variety here. Some
of these are old voices that have been around on your Mac for a long time. But recently Apple has
added the Siri voices and they will show up here as well. The ones you get depend on your country
settings. So I'm going to use Siri Voice 4 which is the most recognizable American voice. You can
preview the voice by pressing the Play button. Hello I'm Siri. You can set the speaking rate
so if you want it to be faster you can go faster or much slower. You can also
set the relative volume. So you can have it go to the maximum volume set by your system or you can
have it speak at a lower volume if you'd rather have things like music be relatively louder.
Now let's look at the four different options here. One thing you could do is simply have
announcements spoken out loud. Let's look at the options here. You can choose a voice. So you can
have a different voice reading announcements than doing other things. This could make it easier to
pick out the announcements from other things being spoken at the time. You get to choose a
phrase that's spoken when the announcement is made. So you can use that location name first,
for instance. Let's preview that. Alert from Finder. You can also use a phrase from this
list down here. So you could see that there are four things there by default. You can have
them go through them one-by-one or pick one at random. You could also edit this phrase list. So,
you can use these here but you can add your own. So you could make your Mac emulate say computers
in science fiction movies and such. The things that they say or just have things that grab your
attention or maybe show off your own sense of humor in the phrases that this feature uses. You
can set a delay. So how long it takes for the phrase to be spoken. So, maybe a notification
shows up and only if you don't do anything for 5 seconds will it be spoken. Otherwise if you
dismiss it then it will never speak. So to enable this make sure you have the checkmark turned On.
So as an example here I've got a reminder set to give me a notification here very shortly.
Alert from Reminders. Now let me change it to one of these and reset the time on this. Alert.
Next we have Speak Selection. So you've got the keyboard shortcut is OptionEscape. That's what
you use to trigger this. But how it works depends on these settings. You can have it Highlight the
Content as it is spoken. You can either highlight words, sentences, or words and sentences.
So if I select both of those then I can set a color for each. So word color can be blue
and maybe I'll use yellow for sentence color. Then the sentence can be either underlined or have a
background color. Let's stick with Underline. Then there's a Controller that can appear. You can have
it appear Automatically when we use this feature or Never or Always, so it's there all the time.
So that's a way to trigger this without using Option Escape. Let's have it do Automatically.
So let's turn this On and let's go to another app like Pages where we can select some text.
Let's try this out. I'm going to use Option Escape to activate it.
(voice is reading Alice is beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister.....). Notice how
all of the text here is underlined. It's just one long sentence. Then the word being spoken
is highlighted. I can Pause. I can Play. I could stop it right there. Turn it Off.
You can use the Turtle Icon here to slow things down and the Rabbit to speed things up.
I find how well the highlighting works really depends on the App you're using. If you are doing
it on a webpage where there's a lot of design behind the text then you'll find that it doesn't
always grab the whole word. But it's closes enough just to give you the idea of where it is at.
Next we have Speak Item Under Pointer. So if you turn this On, (voice says Speak item under
the pointer checked) anytime you move your pointer over something it's going to give you a rundown on
what it is. Now if you go into the buttons here you can have it speak items under the pointer
Always or Only When Using the Zoom feature. You can have Speech Verbosity set to Low and it's
just going to say things like that. Whereas if you go to High it will describe more of what's there.
It has a delay. If you set it really low it's going to speak everything as you move
the pointer around the screen. If you move it up a little bit, like it is here, then
it will wait until you stop the pointer in a certain spot before it starts speaking.
Speak typing feedback works when you're actually typing in an app. It could be in Pages. It could
be in Mail. It could be in a form in Safari. Just about anywhere. The options here are either
Echo Characters every time you press a key on the keyboard. Only Speak a Word when you're done
typing the word. Echo Selection Changes. So that's when you use the keys on your keyboard to select
text. Echo When Using Modifier Keys. Let's have it Echo Words.
I'll turn this On and I'll switch to Pages again. Then watch as I type. It doesn't do anything yet.
But as soon as I hit space it will speak the word. I can see this being useful to some people to be
able to hear the words they are typing spoken back to them. Also it could be useful to hear
when you're using the modifier keys. Control, Option, Command, Shift. Of course all of these
Echoing features become very important if you're not able to see what it is that you are typing.
But even if you can see having spoken announcements that is a little bit better
than having just the sound. Being able to select some text and having it read to you while you
do something else is very useful. Having the words you type being echoed to you can be see
as a useful writing tool. So whether or not you need these functions I encourage you to go
into System Preferences, Accessibility, Spoken
Content and try these out to see which ones could be useful to you. Thanks for watching.