Comment by greenyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyouse | Hacker News Reader

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The flexibility of having a computer read the text via text to speech is a huge benefit IMO. My reading speed is painfully slow but with espeak or a screen reader I can parse about 400 wpm.

One thing that helped me a lot was doing a keybinding for espeak via:

  xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400

I have a relative with dyslexia and it was a helpful hack for him to get reading faster too. Too bad this doesn't usually work as well in school settings where they use physical textbooks.

For any Mac users wanting to try out text to speech and who didn't already know, it's built into OSX. Have a look in your Preferences panel.

It can be very useful if you want to 'read' something while looking at something else, like a game.

You might not know this, but you don't need to go through the Preferences panel. You can use the `say` command from the command line, which uses the same engine, but you can pipe text to it. For example, to dictate whatever's on the clipboard,

    pbpaste | say

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