WebNarrator

WebNarrator is a privacy-first text-to-speech reader that uses your operating system's built-in voices. No cloud APIs, no tracking, no data collection. Everything runs locally on your device.

How to use it

Select any text on any webpage. Press Alt + Shift + S (or ⌥ + ⇧ + S on macOS) or right-click and choose "Read selected text aloud". The current word highlights in yellow as it's spoken. The toolbar popup gives you play / pause / stop controls, a 0.5× to 2.5× speed slider, and a voice picker for any TTS voice your OS has installed.

What makes it different

• Live word-level highlighting: see exactly what's being spoken, on the page itself, not in a separate sidebar. • Works everywhere: articles, docs, blog posts, social media, code-heavy pages, math notation (KaTeX / MathJax), and iframe-embedded content (LeetCode, embedded readers, etc.). • Customizable keyboard shortcut: configure at about:addons → Manage Extension Shortcuts. • Light and dark themes: follows your OS preference automatically, or pick manually. • No internet required: speech is generated by your OS, on your device. Disconnect from Wi-Fi and WebNarrator works exactly the same.

Privacy: no data collected

WebNarrator collects, stores, and transmits zero user data. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking pixels, no cloud calls of any kind. The only things saved locally are your voice choice, your speech rate, and your light/dark theme preference, all stored in your browser, never sent anywhere.

Full privacy policy: https://webnarrator.com/privacy/

A note on voice quality

WebNarrator uses whatever voices your operating system has installed. Most operating systems ship with one or two basic voices and require you to download the high-quality "premium" or "neural" voices separately. If WebNarrator sounds robotic out of the box, you almost certainly have only the basic voices installed. A Step-by-step guide for macOS, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS on how to download better voices: https://webnarrator.com/posts/download-better-voices/