Add text-to-speech (TTS) to content, with playback controls, read-along highlighting, multi-lingual support, and settings for rate, pitch, and voice.
Add text-to-speech (TTS) to content, with playback controls, read-along highlighting, multi-lingual support, and settings for rate, pitch, and voice.
speechSynthesis
browser API. Zero external requests or dependencies.sup
element).position:sticky
.)[lang]
attribute to be spoken by the appropriate voice (assuming the user has it installed).localStorage
, with changes synced across windows (of a given site).speechSynthesis
API not being implemented well enough on those systems and/or programmatic range selection does not work the same way as on desktop. For these reasons, the functionality is disabled by default on mobile operating systems.Try it out on standalone example with some test content.
The settings for Spoken Word are presented in an HTML5 dialog
element. For browsers that do not yet support this feature, the plugin bundles the dialog-polyfill. The polyfill is only included if it is detected the browser does not support dialog
natively. The inclusion of the polyfill can be disabled by adding the following to your theme or plugin:
add_filter( 'spoken_word_include_dialog_polyfill', '__return_false' );
For themes that have a sticky header (such as the nav menu in Twenty Seventeen) you may need to add some additional CSS to ensure that the sticky-positioned playback controls do not get hidden behind the sticky header. For example in Twenty Seventeen, you can add the following to the Custom CSS in the Customizer:
@media screen and (min-width: 782px) { body:not(.admin-bar) .spoken-word--active { top: calc( 0.5em + 70px ); } body.admin-bar .spoken-word--active { top: calc( 0.5em + 32px + 70px ); } }
A bookmarklet can be used to load the Spoken Word functionality into any site, even non-WordPress sites where the plugin is not installed. The key is to use the appropriate contentSelector
:
( () => { const link = document.createElement( 'link' ); link.rel = 'stylesheet'; link.href = 'https://unpkg.com/spoken-word/css/style.css'; document.head.appendChild( link ); const script = document.createElement( 'script' ); script.src = 'https://unpkg.com/spoken-word/dist/spoken-word.js'; script.addEventListener( 'load', () => { spokenWord.initialize( { contentSelector: [ /* 👈 Amend as desired. */ '.hentry', '.entry-content', '.h-entry', '.e-content', '[itemprop="articleBody"]', ].join( ', ' ) } ); } ); document.head.appendChild( script ); } )();
The spokenWord.initialize()
function takes an object as its argument which can have the following properties:
* @param {string} contentSelector - CSS Selector to find the elements for speaking. * @param {Element} rootElement - Root element within which to look for content. * @param {Object} chunkifyOptions - Options passed into chunkify. * @param {boolean} useDashicons - Whether to use Dashicons. * @param {Object} defaultUtteranceOptions - Default utterance options when none are supplied from localStorage.
The dialog and the controls are rendered using Preact. For a list of all the modules used by this plugin, see the package.json.
This plugin is developed on GitHub where the source can be viewed. Please report issues there. Pull requests welcome. The spoken-word
package is also published on npm.
Disable functionality in Android and iOS devices by default.
Initial release.