Read Aloud for Chrome

Reading is good for you, except that, when you sit all day in front of a display, your eyes and brain will start considering it less of a pleasurable activity. Still, that doesn’t mean that your ever-active brain isn’t hungry for information. This is something that scientists at the Softpedia Institute for Made-up Diseases call the “why-do-you-keep-scrolling-when-it’s-past-our-bedtime” syndrome.

Anyway, if for whatever reason you find yourself in the situation when you want to know the information contained by webpage that you don’t actually want to read, then you can try a cross- browser called Read Aloud.

The add-on uses one of many speech engines to read the words from any webpages that contain text, and does a pretty good job at it. Now, don’t expect to hear a captivating Attenborough-esque voice-over reading Wikipedia entries, but you’re still going to get text to speech at probably the best quality available.

A window will pop up when you click the extension, giving you basic playback controls, but also highlighting the text that is being read. The latter is a feature that you can disable if you want to rest your eyes and just listen to the words; also, the window’s design is nothing pretty to look at, so you’re probably better off with just the playback controls.

You can choose from many voices that are basically speech engines developed by the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft (although not all of them are free). You can even use Google Translate’s engines to make the extension read articles in many languages other than English and actually pronounce every word correctly.

To conclude, Read Aloud is a great tool for people who are too tired to read web content (or just don’t feel like it), but also for people who have difficulty reading, like those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities. Surely, this add-on is a great way to enhance their learning processes.