CHROME
Hear content read aloud in Reading Mode
Chrome 134 (released in March) introduces a feature that Edge and Firefox have offered for years – the ability to hear text read aloud when viewing content in its Reading Mode. The option is already available in the Chrome app for Android, and now you can enjoy it in the desktop browser too.
Reading Mode removes everything from web pages except the text and displays the streamlined content in Chrome’s side panel. Here you can change the font, size and background colour of the text to make it as easy to read as possible. The new Read Aloud feature lets you listen to it too, by clicking the Play button in the top-left corner of the side panel ( 1 in our screenshot below).
You can adjust the reading speed to make it up to four times faster, or slow it down, and choose from eight different voices – including the default text-tospeech voice on your PC. Click the highlighter-pen icon 2 to have Read Aloud highlight words, phrases or sentences as it reads them.
To switch to Reading Mode, simply right-click a web page or a highlighted section of text, then choose ‘Open in reading mode’. This will open a text-only version of the content in Chrome’s side panel, where you can use the new Read Aloud options.