I have found a solution that worked for me without restarting (although restarting worked before when this happened)
My problem was that both the Hot Key
or the contextual menu Right-Click
-> Speech
-> Start Speaking
did not work within any application like Chrome
and Text Edit
When I went to System Preferences
-> Accessibility
-> Speech
-> Play
the button toggled to Stop
as if playing but I heard no audio.
My Solution: I switched my default voice from Heather Infovox iVox HQ to Samantha then pressed the Play
button.
I got audio.
Then I switched back to Heather and both Hot Key
and contextual menu Right-Click
-> Speech
-> Start Speaking
worked without quitting any apps or restarting my computer.
Removing voices
All voices are in /System/Library/Speech/Voices
. Just like most other Library
items in OS X, they are inherited, which means you could install them in /Library/Speech/Voices
and ~/Library/Speech/Voices
.
Removing items from /System/Library
is indeed usually not a good thing to do, but here, it does not have any practical consequences beyond making the deleted voices unavailable. Indeed, the list in the System Preferences is dynamically generated from the items found in the said folder, just like the Sound alerts, or the wallpapers. You can confirm this by adding / removing / renaming elements in the /System/Library/Sounds
folder, for example.
There's no other way to manage the speech items, but since this one is without consequences as long as you leave at least one voice, it is actually pretty nice to simply manipulate the filesystem. I have personally long removed Alex, along with other /System/Library
and /Library
items.
Installing voices / what to back up
As you underlined, Lion provides a “Customize” item in the list of voices that allows you to download voices in many languages. Therefore, if you ever delete the original “Alex” voice (the heavy one, 400+MB), you can download it again through this menu.
The “funny” voices, however, are not downloadable. You'll need to back them up if you want to remove them but keep a way to get them back (or you could use a package manager like Pacifist to extract only them from the Lion installer package, but that's a lot of hassle for not much). Nevertheless, considering they weigh, all together, less than 35MB, I'd let them in place.
Please note that you must leave at least one voice for the “Customize” item to be accessible. So, even if you want to remove all voices, leave at least one there, or you won't be able to install any again. “Fred” is the lightest “serious” voice, so I'd advise leaving it in any case.
Size note / a bit of history
As for the relative sizes, Alex is very heavy because it is of much higher quality, and is actually from a totally different generation than the others: it shipped with Leopard, while others have been around since Mac OS 7 (had a lot of fun with them, actually ;) ). Of course, Alex would have filled a full hard drive at the time. There's no "logic" that's shared between voices in those packages, hence the heavy weight of installing new “modern” voices in other languages.
Best Answer
The easy answer is no.
The more complex answer, is that it usually depends on the accessibility of the app. If an app doesn’t use the proper accessibility labels and APIs, it won’t work properly with other assistive technologies like voiceover and speak screen. A classic example of this not working is in an image