UKC

I've been having problems with my vision for the last week & for the moment still don't know why although I've had various tests & scans with more later this week. So I've been keeping the time looking at a screen to a minimum & listening to a lot of radio & podcasts. Reading books & magazines has mostly been barely possible. My vision seems to be improving without treatment and at least the double vision has now gone. But while I can read I've been looking at what software options there might be if things get bad again. I see there are several extensions/plug ins for Firefox that claim to convert text to speech but would be interested if anyone has any experience of such software. Most likely to be used on a MacBook Air running Big Sur, if it can work in both English & French that would be an advantage. Something similar for WORD documents would be useful as well.

Seems 'preview' will 'read' pdfs so I guess I can always convert other formats to pdf but going directly would be easier

Thanks

I've just tried it for first time on my Macbook Pro/Big Sur. It's VERY good. To set it up: System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Speak selection. You then just press the Opt+Esc keys. 

Thanks, works for Safari & Mail but not  Firefox, guess if my sight gets worse I'll have to change browsers - not a disaster & good to know I have options if needed.

Firefox has (as I understand it) an inbuilt "Reader view" (there's an icon in the address bar for it, or F9).  If you switch to Reader View, which seems to be a simplified text only view, there is a "Listen" button, which will read the page to you.  The "Reader view" button doesn't always appear for every page and I wonder if that's a function of the browser or the design of the web page, and not sure if this is what you're looking for, but thought I'd mention it, as it might prompt further thoughts/angles of investigation.

(I'm using FF 86 on Windows 10)

Many thanks, slightly different to access on a Mac but the function is there & works, at least for this site.