Do you find reading web pages tiresome? Would you rather someone read them out so you could sit back and relax and just listen? This is entirely possible and it will not cost you anything.
With a simple command or extension to your web browser you can have web pages read out loud to you and this is great for sites like Wikipedia, news sites and similar ones with large amounts of text. Listening is a lot easier than reading.
Listen to web pages in Edge
Microsoft Edge is recommended if you want to listen to web pages and it is brilliant at it. All you need to do is to right click anywhere in a paragraph of text on a web page and select Read aloud.
Edge begins reading from the beginning of the paragraph and stops at the end or when the stop button is clicked in the voice toolbar that appears at the top of the page.
Click Voice options at the top right and the speed can be adjusted with a slider and the voice selected from a long list of different types, like male, female, US, UK or Australian accents and so on. The voices are among the best and are very natural sounding. Edge is excellent.
Listen to web pages in Chrome
Chrome has a huge market share and it is the web browser that most people use. With the help of a free extension, it can be made to read out loud web pages to save you having to read them.
At one time the Speak It extension was great for this, but many recent reviews report problems with it. It is a similar story with the Select and Speak - Text to Speech extension and it was good, but not so much now.
ReadMe - Text to Speech Reader is probably the best speech extension right now. It is not perfect, but it is pretty good. Install the extension into Chrome. As soon as it has finished installing, which takes just a few seconds, click the puzzle piece icon in the Chrome toolbar and then click the pin to add the ReadMe icon to the toolbar where it is easy to access.
Click and drag over the text of a web page to select everything you want read out loud Don’t worry if there are images in the middle of the text, they will be ignored. Right click the text and select Read text from the menu. It reads all the selected text.
Click the ReadMe icon in the Chrome toolbar and a panel opens on the right. Click the gear icon at the top right to access all the settings for the extension. There are more options off the bottom of this screenshot.
There are many text to speech engines and you can choose from from several English speakers and many different languages. The foreign language ones automatically don’t translate the text before speaking, they just change the accent.
Each speech engine has a volume level, a speaking rate slider that enables you to make it speak faster or slower, speaking pitch that can be raised or lowered, and a voice, such as male, female, US, UK, Spanish, French and many more. The list of speakers is long, although I did find that some triggered a CAPTCHA asking for a code to confirm you are human.
You may find that one speaker is easier to understand or easier on the ear than others, so try each one in turn. A Test button lets you try the current settings, adjust them and then try it again until you are happy with the voice.
There are a few other features that are interesting and there is an option to read the text of files on the computer’s disk. Text files and PDFs can be dragged from the disk and dropped on the ReadMe panel in Chrome and it will speak them out loud. It Should also read Word Files and epub files, but those options did not work for me.
Text can be copied from web pages or documents on the computer and pasted in to ReadMe and it will read them out loud.
This is a good Chrome extension that does the job quite well and it is a useful tool to have for those times when your eyes are tired from too much reading. Set it speaking, close your eyes and sit back and relax as ReadMe reads out the text on the page. I still prefer Edge’s built in features over this Chrome extension though.
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