ClipBoard Speaker

Text-to-speech is a technology that’s useful to many people that may have vision impairment or other disabilities. Thankfully, the technology gets better and more accessible every day, and you can easily notice this from the multitude of programs with text-to-speech features that become available.

Today, we’re going to look at (but also listen to) a program that has the ability to read any text that you copy to your clipboard. It’s suggestively titled ClipBoard Speaker.

When you run the program, it will start reading every text that you copy to your clipboard. While this is surely a very useful feature to people with vision impairment, it can also be a bit annoying. Even though playback options aren’t lacking, you can only mute ClipBoard Speaker by turning the volume all the way down. A mute button would have been a most welcome addition.

You can however adjust the reading speed and also choose between two standard Microsoft voices, David and Zira. All of your copied texts are saved by the program as separate entries, so you could say that it also works as clipboard history keeper.

Each piece of clipboard text can be saved as an audio file (either WAV or MP3) which is probably quite a helpful feature if you want to use them in a creative manner. In the full version of the program you can also use export them as playlists.

You also have the option of changing some display features, such as the way the panels are split in the program’s interface, the text font and the font size. More importantly, you can copy any of text form the interface with added SSML markup tags.

While it doesn’t have the best looking or most intuitive interface, ClipBoard Speaker has enough features to make it a useful program.