Mac – How to use Mac’s Preview application text speech feature

This seems to be a bug in Preview. There's a related thread about this topic in which many people say they are experiencing the same problem. I too have just tested it out and see the same results.

There are 2 workarounds I can think of. The 1st is to select all the annotations and set their color manually:

1. Open the annotations toolbar.
2. Press the right-most button which will show you a list of all the annotations.
3. Select all the annotations.
4. Choose a new color from the annotations toolbar.

The 2nd workaround is to use the Python script from the same thread previously mentioned.

Go to System Preferences -> Speech -> Select the "Text to Speech" tab, then choose the voice you want from the "System Voice" drop down.

On my Lion machine (not sure whether it's the same on Mountain Lion), I had to click "Customize..." from the dropdown then select "Daniel" to download from the "English (United Kingdom)" section.