How to Add the Text to Speech Feature in WordPress
As a website owner or administrator, it’s in your interest to make your website easily available and accessible to your audience. That means, of course, ensuring that the website has a good uptime, that it loads quickly, and that it’s easy to navigate. But it also means giving the visitors alternative ways of consuming the content on your website.
That’s exactly what text-to-speech does, to the joy of many people who have problems with seeing or reading. In WordPress, however, text-to-speech isn’t available out of the box, so you have to add it using a plugin.
In this article, we’ll show you:
Text-to-speech is the kind of technology that transfers the words as they’re written on a web page into spoken word. What happens behind the hood of one such program is probably exponentially more complicated than the “it reads from the page” explanation, but it’s still how most of us get to experience text-to-speech.
Text-to-speech is a common component of operating systems and even some word processors. It is usually bundled with other accessibility features because, at its core, text-to-speech is used to read aloud the contents of the page to those who can’t do it on their own.
The opposite of text-to-speech is called speech-to-text or voice recognition. As its name says, it takes the words you speak, and it “hears” and then transcribes them onto a medium.
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The obvious answer to this question is because some people either can’t see well or can’t read. If your website doesn’t have text-to-speech features, you’re robbing them of all of the great content you’ve created, and that’s not fair to either of you, right? You might be their favorite writer and they might be your most loyal audience member, and you can never know it just because your website didn’t have enabled text-to-speech.
Okay, yes, the operating system might take care of it if you don’t. But do you want to rely on its accessibility options for assisting your readers? Best be proactive and do it on your own.
There is another very neat trick writers can do with text-to-speech. If the word processor you use has a good text-to-speech feature, you can use it as one layer of proofreading. There’s nothing like hearing your words being read in a strange, slightly fake voice to point out the mistakes you’ve made when writing. So go ahead, give it a go, and see if it helps you cut down on the proofreading time.
It’s fairly simple to add text-to-speech to your website thanks to the ResponsiveVoice Text to Speech plugin. You can easily find the plugin by navigating to your website’s backend, going to Plugins > Add New, and searching for ResponsiveVoice. After installing and activating it, the plugin will be ready to go.
The plugin won’t bother you with many options in the backend of your website. If you want to use it to add a button that will allow people to hear the contents of a whole page, simply add this shortcode to your page:
[responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to Post"]
Upon previewing or publishing, you will see a “listen to post” button that will, if you click on it, read the whole post for you.
Of course, you don’t have to add the feature to a whole post. You can only enable text-to-voice on a certain paragraph or two using the following code:
[responsivevoice voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this"] A button to read only the text surrounded by these shortcodes. [/responsivevoice]
Here’s how it would look if you used it on your web page:
When you preview it and listen to it, you’ll only hear the part of the content that’s in between the text-to-voice tags.
The plugin lets you change several things, including the pitch, the rate, and the volume of the voice, as well as the voice itself. The English female is the default, but you can just as easily have your Joyce narrated by an American male. The plugin is free in its basic version, which does more than enough, but also comes in Pro and Enterprise versions.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
The written – and spoken – word is one of the best things about being human, if not the best thing. It would be a real shame if someone was denied that enjoyment simply for a lack of education or a health or cognitive predicament.
But luckily for us who like to write – and who live off of it – and for those who like to read, there’s a way around issues with reading and readability. Text-to-speech is a great innovative technology that’s widely available and it’s getting better by the day. So while it would be best if no one would ever need it, we sure should be glad it’s there!
