Internet has more information than a single person can read in six lifetimes. There are so many books available and new books are coming everyday. And then there are all those news and blog sites. We are not even mentioning the encyclopedias of any kind. All of this information is available in the text format. Reading is a great habit but if you feel tired of reading day in and day out, then you should consider a nice little extension for Firefox called “Read Aloud : A Text to Speech Voice Reader”.
The title of this Firefox extension explains everything and anyone can deduce that it can turn text into speech for reading it out aloud. It accomplishes all of this using the text-to-speech TTS engine that comes built inside Windows. It also uses the TTS voices that come pre-installed on Windows. We can also install third-party voices and use them.
After installing Read Aloud extension in Firefox, you will notice a new icon in the toolbar. Now all you have to do is open a webpage containing the text that you want it to read. We suggest the classic literature hosted by Project Gutenberg website for trying out this extension. After the webpage has loaded, you can click on the Read Aloud icon in the toolbar and it will start reading all the text on that page.
It has a toolbar that looks like a media player toolbar with buttons for stop, play, previous and next. We can use the previous and next buttons to skip to previous or next paragraphs in the text. If you want to listen to a particular portion section from text, then you have to first select that portion of text, right-click on it and then use Read Aloud extension for listening to it.
In the options for Read Aloud extension, we can change the voice used for the TTS engine, the speed, pitch and the volume for reading the text. We can also enable highlighting the text as it reads it.
You can get the Read Aloud extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-aloud/.