MacOS – Highlight and immediately speak selected text in one click – Text To Speech on Mac

automatormacosshortcuttext to speechvoice-dictation

I am a very heavy text to speech user on the Mac.
Every time I use text to speech I have to triple click the paragraph to select it, and then hit option escape to activate text to speech. I wish that instead I could just option click a paragraph and it would immediately start speaking. I imagine this could be achieved using Automator or a similar tool combined with shortcuts? Does anybody know how to make this happen?

Action I wish existed for text to speech:
Option + click = highlight the entire paragraph and immediately begin reading = triple click + (option + Escape)

Best Answer

Here is an item that you can put in your Karabiner private.xml file to make Option-Escape highlight the current paragraph (under your mouse cursor) and being reading it.

I also implemented the command for stopping it as you requested (Command-Shift-S) though I don't believe there's a way to go back two seconds and start reading again.

<item>
    <identifier>private.tripleclick</identifier>
    <name>Option-Escape to Triple-Click and Text-to-Speech</name>
    <autogen>
        __KeyToKey__
        KeyCode::ESCAPE, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L,

        @begin
        PointingButton::LEFT, PointingButton::LEFT, PointingButton::LEFT,
        KeyCode::ESCAPE, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L
        @end
    </autogen>
</item>
<item>
    <identifier>private.stoptts</identifier>
    <name>Command-Shift-S stops Text-to-Speech</name>
    <autogen>
        __KeyToKey__
        KeyCode::S, ModifierFlag::COMMAND_L, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L,
        KeyCode::ESCAPE, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L
    </autogen>
</item>
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