Help to create an Activity for VoiceOver on Mac

By Arya, 15 October, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi Friends,

I want to create an activity in Mac Voice Over for read Voice Over content, in which VO has to use a different voice and speech rate.

How to accomplish this task.

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By Arya on Sunday, December 3, 2023 - 13:57

Hi Friends,
I need your guidance to create an activity for VO in MAC to do the following.1. when I press VO plus A the VO voice should change .
2. IT should read slower to my selected speech rate.
Is it possible to create such activity in mac?

By mr grieves on Sunday, December 3, 2023 - 13:57

My understanding is that you can have an activity trigger in the following ways:

1. Use VO+X and select an activity. This is a bit broken in Sonoma, but works OK in older versions.
2. Assign the activity to a particular app or web page and then it will automatically switch activity when you change app. For web pages this doesn't work very well and may stop working after you set it up. But for apps it tends to be fine.
3.There's some weird context switching thing in Sonoma. I think this is just the same as 2 but a little less obvious as to what it's doing so I've not tried it.

Im not aware of being able to have an activity switch specifically on VO+A. I'm also not sure there's anything built-in to switch to a specific activity. I had a look in keyboard commander and you can assign a shortcut to switch to the previous activity but oddly not the next one.

It's possible you can do something with shortcuts or AppleScript but I'll have to leave that for someone more knowledgable.

So as far as I know, your best bet would probably be VO+X, change activity, VO+A to read. I tried this in Sonoma and it looks like it should work despite the bugs it has with VO+X.

You certainly can setup an activity to use a different voice/speech rate etc. If you create a new activity in VO Utility (VO+F8) then select it, you will have various options you can enable. Tick "VoiceS" then press the Set button. In there you can choose what voice you want. I have an activity that switches to Siri and slows down speaking a lot.

If you need any help getting that done I'd be happy to go through it in more detail.

I don't really know your use case, but one other thing you could consider is Microsoft Edge. If you press Cmd+Shift+U it will read out the web page using one of the Microsoft voices. These are incredible and much nicer than the ones in VoiceOver. This might not help but thought I'd mention it. If I'm reading a lot of text in a web page I always switch to Edge and do it there.

By mr grieves on Sunday, December 10, 2023 - 13:57

This isn't something I've used, but I wonder if Spoken Content would be a good alternative to VoiceOver for this kind of thing. This is under System Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content.

You can set up a voice and rate that is independent from VoiceOver. If you turn on speak selection, you can press Option+Escape to read content out. If you have something selected it will read that out, otherwise it sounds like it should read whatever text is on the screen - for example an email message or something.

Apologies if this is no good but it might be worth a try.

By Arya on Sunday, December 10, 2023 - 13:57

Hi grieves, Thanks for the reply. With the guidance you gave I was able to create an activity successfully, with a different voice and different speech rate than the default one I am using. Now my only challange is how to assign this activity to the keystorke VO plus A so that where ever I want to read long text it will help me. Thanks for suggesting edge, I will give it a spin in my mac.

By Arya on Sunday, December 10, 2023 - 13:57

Hi grieves, I will try it out and get back with the results.
Hope this might be a work around for task I am trying to accomplish.