Readable gives you several ways to hear text, so you can pick whichever suits the moment:
- Play and Read Selection
- Select text and click Play or press ⌥ Option+⌘ Command+P. With nothing selected, Play reads from where you last clicked to the bottom of the window.
- Hover Read Modes
- Point at text to hear a word, a line, a sentence, or everything from the pointer downwards.
- Speak on Select
- Readable reads text the moment you finish selecting it.
- Text Extractor (OCR)
- Drag a box around any text on screen to copy it and hear it.
- Stop Speech
- Press Esc or ⌃ Control, or click Stop.
Reading text you can’t select
Many apps share their text with macOS, and Readable reads it directly. Where an app doesn’t — scanned or image-only PDFs, pictures, video frames, remote-desktop and virtual-machine windows — Readable recognises the text on screen instead. You don’t need to do anything different: Play, Document hover and the Text Extractor handle this for you. Readable already knows that apps such as Adobe Acrobat and Reader, remote-desktop clients and some messaging apps need on-screen recognition, and uses it straight away for them.