How to read a PDF aloud on Mac (nothing to install)
To read a PDF aloud on Mac you don't need to download anything. Open the PDF in Preview, select the text and go to Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. Your Mac reads it in the system voice. If you want to do it from any app, turn on Speak Selection in Accessibility and you get a keyboard shortcut that works everywhere.
That covers almost every case. What it doesn't cover is what happened to me: the voice sounds robotic, the PDF is a scan with no text in it, or the PDF is your professor's lecture slides and hearing them read out loud doesn't really help.
I'm a computer engineering student and I've spent years listening to readings while following along on screen. Here's what works for me, from the quickest setup to the one that actually helps you study.
The quickest way: Preview
Preview ships with every Mac and has text to speech built in, even though hardly anyone knows it's there.
- Open the PDF in Preview (just double-click it, unless you changed your default app).
- Select the text you want to hear. For the whole document, click on a page and press Command + A.
- Go to Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. Your Mac starts reading.
- To stop, go to Edit > Speech > Stop Speaking.
It works well for a chapter or a reading with continuous text. What it doesn't do is follow along: it doesn't highlight the word it's on, so if your mind wanders for a second you lose your place.
Speak Selection: one shortcut for every app
The option I use most lives in Accessibility, and it works in Preview, Safari, Notes or anywhere else you can select text.
- Open System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
- Turn on Speak Selection. The default shortcut is Option + Esc.
- Select a paragraph in any app and press the shortcut. Press it again to stop.
On that same screen there are three settings worth changing:
- Speaking rate. The slider controls how fast it talks. For studying I keep it just under the middle; any faster and I'm racing to keep up instead of understanding.
- Highlight content. In the Speak Selection options you can have it highlight the word or sentence being read. Listening and reading along at the same time keeps you on track, and it's what turns text to speech into something you can actually study with.
- Speak item under pointer. Hover over a paragraph and it reads it. Handy for jumping between blocks without selecting anything.
Better voices: swap the default one
If the voice sounds robotic, you're not imagining it: the defaults are the most basic ones. macOS has far more natural voices you can download for free.
- In Spoken Content, open the System Voice menu and choose Manage Voices.
- Find your language. You'll see several voices per region, with "Enhanced" or "Premium" versions that are bigger downloads but sound a lot better.
- Download one, select it and test it with the play button.
One tip I learned late: match the voice to the language of the text. A Spanish voice reading an English paper pronounces every word as if it were Spanish, and five minutes in you've stopped listening. If you study in two languages, keep one voice downloaded for each and switch depending on the PDF.
When the PDF won't read
Sometimes you select and nothing happens. It's almost always one of three things:
- It's a scan. The PDF is a picture of each page with no text layer. On recent versions of macOS, Live Text lets you select text inside an image in Preview; if that fails, export the page as an image and try there. For a whole scanned book, run it through an OCR tool first.
- It's locked. Some PDFs block copying and selecting. If it's course material, ask your professor for an unlocked version. They almost always have one.
- It reads out of order. With two columns, tables or sidebars, the voice jumps between columns mid-sentence. The fix is selecting one column at a time: slow, but it works.
The problem with listening to lecture slides
This is the part that took me longest to figure out. Everything above works great for continuous text: a chapter, a paper, a long set of notes. With lecture slides, not so much.
A typical slide has a title and three bullet points of four words each. Your Mac reads them perfectly in ten seconds, and you've learned nothing new: it's what you were already looking at, said out loud. What your professor said about those three bullets in lecture (the example, the why, how it connects to last week) isn't written down anywhere.
A text to speech app tells you what's written. On a slide, what matters is what isn't.
That's why I built Filmina, an app you use in your browser, with nothing to install, that doesn't read your PDFs and lecture slides but explains them out loud, slide by slide, with a frame that points to the part of the page it's talking about at each moment. That's the difference from a reader like Speechify, which I break down in Filmina vs Speechify, and the details are in how each slide gets explained. Pointing at where to look does the job of following with your finger: you always know where on the page you are.
How I use it to study
Listening doesn't replace studying, but it helps a lot at two moments.
A first pass over a long topic. When I've got forty pages of reading, I listen to it once straight through with the text in front of me, no notes. It gives me the shape of the topic before I dig into details. Speak Selection and a good voice are enough for that.
When I'm tired. Late at night, silent reading turns into a row of words that don't go in. Listening makes me keep pace with the voice and it's harder to nod off, something I wrote about in why I fall asleep while studying.
What I don't do:
- Listen without looking. With the PDF closed, out on a walk, I remember very little. For studying, your ears back up your eyes; they don't replace them.
- Stop at listening. After each section I close the PDF and ask myself what I just heard. If I can't say it in my own words, I haven't learned it yet. Listening puts the topic in front of you; recalling it without looking is what makes it stick.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my Mac to read a PDF out loud?
Open the PDF in Preview, select the text and go to Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. You can also turn on Speak Selection in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content and use Option + Esc in any app.
How do I change the text to speech voice on Mac?
In System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content, open the System Voice menu and choose Manage Voices. You can download enhanced voices for each language for free, and they sound much more natural than the defaults.
Why won't my Mac read a PDF aloud?
Usually the PDF is a scan with no text layer, it's protected against copying, or no text is selected. If it's a scan, try selecting the text with Live Text or run it through an OCR tool first.
Is listening to a PDF a good way to study?
It's useful for a first pass and for keeping your focus when you're tired, as long as you follow the text on screen. To actually learn it, close the material afterward and try to explain what you heard without looking.