Reading the Screen Aloud — a catalogue of screen & selection TTS (Aug 2026): 1,553 entries banded by what they actually do, tagged by platform / acquisition mechanism / clipboard cost / model supply, with 1,016 first-hand community reports and a direct link on every item discussed. No ranking, no verdict, nothing discarded.

00-INDEX.md

Reading the Screen Aloud — a catalogue of screen and selection text-to-speech

1,553 catalogued entries. No recommendation, no ranking, no verdict.

What this is

A capability catalogue of software that turns what is on your screen — a selection, a region, a window, a focused control — into speech. It profiles mechanisms: how each tool gets text off the screen, how a human triggers it, what synthesises the audio, where the voices come from, and what each of those choices costs.

It is deliberately not a ranking. Bands and tags describe scope, not quality. A tool banded ADJACENT may be better software than one banded CORE; it simply does a different job. Where a comparison appears it carries a number, not an ordinal.

Nothing found was discarded. Items that turned out to be dormant, withdrawn, proprietary, mis-named or entirely off-target are catalogued with a band and a reason rather than deleted — a silent exclusion is indistinguishable from an oversight.

Data date: 2026-08-09. Every star count, licence, install count and price was read on that date or is labelled otherwise. Every claim carries an evidence tier:

Tier	Meaning	Rows
[measured]	The source, API or code was read for this specific capability	885
[vendor]	The maker's own claim, not independently checked	319
[lead]	It exists; the capability was not read	316
[derived]	An inference from measured facts	21
[community]	A user report, always quoted and deep-linked	—

Nothing was executed. No tool was installed, run or timed. Every capability claim is documentation-reading, source-reading or a community report. This is the single largest limit on everything below, and it is stated first rather than buried.

The one idea that makes the catalogue readable

A screen reader is a pipeline, not a product, and the popular projects occupy one slice of it:

L1 ACQUIRE  ── how text gets off the screen
               selection via accessibility API · selection via simulated copy · clipboard watch
               OCR of a region · OCR full-screen · accessibility-tree follow-focus · browser DOM
L2 TRIGGER  ── how a human invokes it on what is on screen right now
               global hotkey · tray daemon · floating button · browser toolbar · follow-focus mode
L3 SYNTH    ── text to audio: local neural model · OS-native engine · cloud API
L4 MODELS   ── where voices come from: HuggingFace · bundled · ONNX · OS voices · cloud account
L5 OUTPUT   ── playback: pause/resume/skip · speed · word highlighting · sentence streaming

Piper, Kokoro, XTTS, F5-TTS, Chatterbox and GPT-SoVITS own L3 and L4 only. Hand them a string, get audio back. They have no way to get text off a screen and no human trigger. Sort this domain by stars and they fill the top of the table while being unable to do the thing the catalogue is about. The tools that own L1 and L2 mostly carry two to three orders of magnitude fewer stars.

That is why every table below leads with acquisition, not popularity.

The catalogue at a glance

Basis for every figure in this section: FINAL.json, rows where band = CORE, n = 448.

Band	Entries	What it means
CORE	448	Owns acquisition and a human trigger — it can read what is on your screen
ADJACENT	730	Brokers, OCR-to-clipboard, voice supply, document-scoped readers, protocols, harnesses
ENGINE-only	279	Synthesis; no acquisition, no human trigger
OUT-OF-BAND	96	Found in the sweep, does not serve this use case — kept, not discarded

How the 448 get text off the screen:

Acquisition	n	Reaches	Does not reach
browser-DOM	82	Page content in its own tab	Anything outside the browser
clipboard-watch	73	Whatever you copy, from anywhere	Requires you to copy first
selection via accessibility API	68	The live selection, without touching your clipboard	Apps that do not publish it
accessibility-tree follow-focus	61	Whatever has focus, continuously	Content not exposed to the tree
OCR screen-region	53	Any pixels, including remote sessions	Costs an OCR pass; no semantics
selection via simulated copy	51	Any window that answers Ctrl/Cmd+C	Destroys your clipboard
unknown	44	—	Mechanism not documented anywhere reachable
OCR full-screen	13	The whole display	Same costs, wider
document-parse	3	Files opened inside the tool	The rest of the screen

The two costs that decide daily usability, and are usually undocumented:

Does it clobber your clipboard?	n		Does it survive in Electron apps and terminals?	n
no	261		yes	118
unknown	105		partial	49
yes	60		no	48
n/a	9		unknown	145
not recorded	13		n/a / not recorded	88

Platform, runtime, status (CORE band; platforms multi-count):

Platform	n		Runtime	n		Status	n
Windows	198		local-only	253		active	169
macOS	134		hybrid	75		dormant	66
browser-extension	95		cloud-API	56		commercial-live	48
Linux (unspecified)	48		os-native	39		discontinued	13
Linux-X11	40		unknown	25		archived	6
Linux-Wayland	28
Android	28
iOS	16
headless-server	3

253 of 448 run entirely locally — no account, no key, no third party in the loop at runtime.

Of the 68 accessibility-API selection readers: 44 are clipboard-safe, 39 run on macOS, and 19 are both on macOS and clipboard-safe.

Contents

File	What is in it
01-anatomy.md	The five layers in full, the six acquisition mechanisms compared, band definitions, and the star-count evidence for the burial problem
02-platform-mechanics.md	Why the same tool behaves differently per OS, at API level: macOS AX and TCC, Windows UIA and SAPI, X11 PRIMARY vs Wayland's privileged operations, browsers, and remote desktop
03-community-reception.md	What 1,016 first-hand reports across six venues actually say — including the contradiction this document refuses to resolve
04-voice-and-model-supply.md	Where voices come from, what they cost, real install weight vs advertised size, the espeak-ng licensing question, and the commercial AT voice market
05-method-coverage-and-gaps.md	How this was built, what it could not establish, what does not exist, and the exact commands to re-run the sweep
06-appendix-S-stack-notes.md	A strippable annotation layer for one specific setup. Delete it and every fact above still stands
catalogue-core.md	448 rows — tool, platforms, acquisition, clipboard cost, trigger chord, runtime, status, stars, licence, evidence tier
catalogue-engines.md	279 rows — synthesis engines
catalogue-adjacent.md	730 rows — the adjacent tier
catalogue-outofband.md	96 rows — found and kept, out of scope

Three findings worth reading before the tables

1. The axis is latency, not modernity. Blind screen-reader users repeatedly report preferring formant synthesis (ETI-Eloquence, eSpeak NG, DECtalk) over neural models — for key-press-to-speech latency, for predictability at 600–1200 wpm, and for accuracy. Dyslexic readers report the opposite in places, and the dyslexia population is itself split. Cutting across both: a blind NVDA user who actively wants neural synthesis and is blocked only by latency, with measured figures — 500 ms FP32 and 1100 ms INT8 for Kokoro against 5–10 ms for eSpeak (kokoro#291). The evidence is laid out in 03-community-reception.md and not resolved — which population a reader belongs to changes the answer, and that is the reader's call.

2. Four failure classes belong to the domain, not to any project. Neural word-skipping and garbling (also present in OS-native and commercial stacks, so not a neural-only defect); advertised model size versus real install weight; the espeak-ng phonemizer sitting under Piper, Kokoro and KittenTTS so its defects propagate downstream; and missing SSML in the newer open models. Two more surfaced beyond the first four: the Wayland wall, and PDF/maths/citation syntax defeating every reader tested.

3. Remote desktop inverts the usual preference order. Natively, an accessibility-API reader is the well-behaved non-destructive choice and a clipboard-simulating one is crude. Inside an RDP window on a macOS client the accessibility route returns nothing — the session is one opaque surface — while clipboard redirection is bidirectional and unqualified in Microsoft's own client table. The crude route is the one that works. Full mechanics in 02-platform-mechanics.md.

What this document deliberately does not do

• No recommendation and no ranking. Not a hedge — a design constraint. Superlatives appear only inside attributed quotations, never in the author's voice.
• No resolution of the latency-versus-quality question. The evidence is presented from both sides with its provenance, because the answer depends on facts about the reader.
• No claim to have run anything. See the evidence tiers above.
• No silent exclusions. Every item found is in one of the four catalogue files.

Reproducing and disputing this

05-method-coverage-and-gaps.md carries the query vocabulary and the exact gh and API commands, so the sweep can be re-run and the numbers refreshed rather than trusted. Free-text values that had escaped their enums were normalised into coded values with the originals preserved in acquisition_method_raw and platforms_raw, so any mapping judgement can be disputed at the row.

Known internal inconsistency, disclosed rather than papered over: 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows still carry an L1 or L2 layer tag, and 2 of the 448 CORE rows lack one. Verification covered the CORE band only, so those tags were never re-checked.

---

Method, in one paragraph

Two blind discovery rounds (8 angles, then 10 more chosen by a critic that proved — by counting the first round's 639 logged queries — that all of them had hit essentially four surfaces). A second critic verified its claims against a 3,530-key name index and killed two of its own hypotheses rather than report false gaps. Then verification: 378 CORE rows re-read against primary sources, producing 594 factual corrections and 36 re-bandings; of 226 rows claiming measured in the registry and forge sweeps, 33 kept that label — 193 became vendor, 67 lead. A relationship crawl over forks and derivatives added 111 rows that keyword search structurally could not reach. Community reception across six venues produced 1,016 records. Finally an adversarial pass briefed to refute rather than confirm charged 4 WRONG and 8 MISLEADING defects — including a quotation cut that had reversed a witness's position — all of which were repaired and independently re-checked.

Catalogue compiled 2026-08-09.

01-anatomy.md

Functional anatomy — how to read every table below

A tool that reads your screen aloud is not one product. It is five separable functions that happen to ship together. A tool can own four of them and silently miss one, and the missing one is what you feel. This section names the five, gives the failure mode of each missing piece, and defines the vocabulary the rest of the document uses.

A screen-reading stack — five separable functions
|
+-- 1. L1 ACQUIRE  (how text gets OFF the screen and into a string)
|      - selection via accessibility API   - selection via simulated copy
|      - clipboard watch                   - accessibility-tree follow-focus
|      - OCR of a screen region            - OCR of the full screen
|      - browser DOM                       - document parse (file, not screen)
|      WHY it matters: this is the layer that decides WHAT you are able to point at.
|      Missing: the tool can only speak text you have already typed or pasted into its own
|      window — which means you are transcribing by hand, the exact labour you wanted removed.
|
+-- 2. L2 TRIGGER  (a human causing it to happen, on what is on screen right now)
|      - global hotkey        - context-menu item      - toolbar button
|      - tray/menubar action  - always-on watcher (clipboard, focus)
|      WHY it matters: it converts a capability into a reflex. A command-line entry point is NOT
|      a trigger under this model — a CLI requires you to leave the thing you were reading,
|      find a terminal, and re-supply the text.
|      Missing: you own an engine, not a reader. 279 of the 1,553 catalogued entries are banded
|      ENGINE-only on exactly that ground, and the star table below shows which projects those are.
|
+-- 3. L3 SYNTH  (turning a string into audio — the runtime)
|      - OS speech service (SAPI5, AVSpeechSynthesizer, speech-dispatcher)
|      - local neural runtime (ONNX, GGML, PyTorch)
|      - cloud HTTP API
|      WHY it matters: it sets latency, offline behaviour, and per-word cost.
|      Missing: nothing is audible. Tools with L1+L2 but no L3 (OCR capture tools, clipboard
|      managers) are catalogued as ADJACENT — they hand a string to something else.
|
+-- 4. L4 MODELS  (the voices themselves, and who supplies them)
|      - bundled with the tool   - downloaded from a model hub   - OS voice inventory
|      - vendor-hosted, account-bound
|      WHY it matters: voice quality and voice AVAILABILITY are separate questions from
|      whether the tool works. A tool can own L1-L3 and still sound like 1998 because its L4
|      is whatever eSpeak the OS shipped.
|      Missing / thin: the reading works, and you stop using it after a week.
|
+-- 5. L5 OUTPUT  (what happens to the audio)
       - immediate playback     - pause / resume / rewind-a-sentence
       - speed control          - device routing     - save to file
       WHY it matters: for continuous reading, "stop and re-hear that sentence" is the control
       you will reach for constantly.
       Missing: the tool speaks a paragraph at you and cannot be interrupted or rewound, which
       for a long document is functionally unusable.

Read as: the layer model is a checklist for reading a row, not a scoring system. A row that owns L1 through L5 is not thereby better than one that owns L1+L2 — it is merely self-contained. Several entries here deliberately own two layers and delegate the rest, and that is a design, not a deficiency.

---

How the band and the layer tags relate — and where they disagree

Two separate annotations are attached to every catalogue row, and they were produced by two different operations.

• The band (fit_band) is a judgement made by reading what the project actually does: can it get text off a screen, and can a human fire it at what is on screen now.
• The layer tags (layers, L1-ACQUIRE … L5-OUTPUT) are a raw per-row annotation of which functions the project's own documentation describes.

The verification pass — which re-read primary sources and corrected fields — covered the CORE band only. The layer tags on the other three bands were never re-checked against their sources. The two annotations therefore disagree on 59 rows [measured, own count over FINAL.json]:

• 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows still carry L1-ACQUIRE or L2-TRIGGER in their own layers list — among them macOS /usr/bin/say, Gespeaker, tts-overlay (j-junckes), voiced (sdelcore), Glate (Flathub) and isimud-text-to-speech. Typically the tag was granted because the project reads a file or a caller-supplied argument, which the banding rule does not count as acquiring from a screen.
• 2 of the 448 CORE rows do not carry both tags: Speakonia (CFS-Technologies) and ReadPlease has no L2-TRIGGER, and MS Edge TTS Extension (yacine-bens) has no L1-ACQUIRE.

Read as: where the two disagree, the band is the considered judgement and the layer list is the unreviewed raw annotation. This is stated rather than repaired, because repairing it silently would hide the fact that a reader who filters the catalogue by layers gets a different answer from one who filters by fit_band. If you filter, filter on fit_band. It is not true that the 279 ENGINE-only rows have neither L1 nor L2 in their data — an earlier draft of this section said so, and the layer column contradicts it.

---

Where the attention is, and where the acquisition is

The catalogue holds 1,553 entries — CORE 448, ADJACENT 730, ENGINE-only 279, OUT-OF-BAND 96 [measured, own count over FINAL.json]. 279 are banded ENGINE-only: they own L3 and L4, and a caller supplies the string. There is no route by which they obtain text from a screen and no human trigger.

This is not an inference about obscure projects. It is what their own repositories say. GPT-SoVITS is described by its own README as a voice cloning and training studio driven from a Gradio WebUI [measured, https://github.com/RVC-Boss/GPT-SoVITS]. Coqui TTS is a toolkit and model zoo whose input is a caller-supplied string [lead, https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS]. Kokoro exposes a Python KPipeline class and the README shows library use rather than a CLI [measured, https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro]. F5-TTS ships f5-tts_infer-cli and a Gradio app [measured, https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS]. Chatterbox is a model plus inference code, with HTTP surfaces supplied by third-party wrappers [measured, https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox].

Now the star counts, side by side. Every figure below is a GitHub stargazer count read through gh api on 2026-08-09 [measured].

Entry	Band	Layers owned	Stars
GPT-SoVITS	ENGINE-only	L2†, L3, L4	60,613
Coqui TTS	ENGINE-only	L3, L4	45,868
Chatterbox	ENGINE-only	L3, L4	25,920
F5-TTS	ENGINE-only	L2†, L3, L4	15,089
Piper — archived repo	ENGINE-only	L3, L4	11,276
Kokoro	ENGINE-only	L3, L4	8,341
Piper — current upstream	ENGINE-only	L3, L4	5,074
Pot	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L5	19,216
Easydict	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L5	14,168
Text Grab	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L5	4,852
NVDA	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L4, L5	2,616
Speech Note	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L4, L5	1,558
TextGO	CORE	L1, L2	327
Dictater	CORE	L1, L2, L5	227
Talkie	CORE	L1, L2, L3, L4, L5	78

Every Layers owned cell above is read directly from the catalogue's layers field on 2026-08-09, so the table and the data agree row for row [measured].

† GPT-SoVITS and F5-TTS carry an L2-TRIGGER tag that this section does not endorse. Both are banded ENGINE-only on capability, and neither ships a way for a human to invoke it on the current selection. They are two of the 57 ENGINE-only rows disclosed above whose layer tags were never re-checked, because the verification pass covered the CORE band only. The tag is shown rather than silently corrected so the disagreement stays visible and disputable.

The distribution behind that sample, computed over every catalogue entry hosted on GitHub with a readable star count [measured, own count over FINAL.json]:

Population	n	Median stars	At or above 10,000	Below 500
ENGINE-only, GitHub-hosted	141	1,700	29	49
CORE (banded L1+L2), GitHub-hosted	267	1	3	252

The median CORE entry on GitHub has one stargazer. 252 of 267 sit below 500. The two populations are the same size to within a factor of two and differ by three orders of magnitude in median attention.

One further data point on what a stars-first search surfaces: MoneyPrinterTurbo carries 102,264 stars [measured, gh api 2026-08-09], which a stars-descending sort of this catalogue places above every one of the 448 CORE entries. It generates short-form marketing videos. It has no acquisition layer and no trigger, and it is catalogued OUT-OF-BAND for that reason.

Read as: sorting this problem space by stars sorts it by engine, because engines are what a general developer audience stars. The projects that solve the acquisition problem — the ones banded CORE — carry a median of one star and would sit below the fold under any stars-first ordering. That is the reason this document is not sorted by stars, and the reason the tables below lead with acquisition method.

Declared limit on the star figures. A stargazer count measures GitHub-account attention, not installs, not users, and not quality. NVDA's repository shows 2,616 stars; its Windows installed base is not derivable from GitHub and was not established here. Several CORE entries are not on GitHub at all — Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons entries report user counts, App Store entries report ratings, and closed-source Windows tools report neither. Those figures are recorded in their own rows in their native unit and are deliberately excluded from the two tables above, because mixing installs with stars would produce a comparison that means nothing.

---

The acquisition mechanisms

L1 is where the real choice lives. Nine mechanisms account for the whole CORE band, and each one buys a different reach at a different cost. The two costs that recur in the evidence are: does it destroy what is on your clipboard, and does it still work inside Electron applications and terminal emulators — the places a solo engineer actually reads text.

Basis for every number in this table. All 448 rows banded CORE in FINAL.json, reading the acquisition_method, clipboard_destructive and works_in_electron_or_terminal fields [measured, own count 2026-08-09]. Values that had escaped the enum as free text were normalised into it (459 acquisition values and 647 platform lists across the catalogue); the original strings are preserved in the *_raw fields, so any normalisation decision can be re-read and disputed. Blank fields are reported as not-recorded, separately from an explicit unknown.

Mechanism	n	Can reach	Cannot reach	Clipboard clobbered	Electron / terminal
browser-DOM	82	page text and the browser's own selection object, inside the tab	every pixel outside the browser — no PDF viewer, no editor, no terminal	76 "no", 2 "unknown", 2 "n/a" — it reads text nodes, not the clipboard	45 explicit "no", 30 "n/a" — out of scope by construction
clipboard-watch	73	anything you can copy, in any application	anything you cannot or did not copy; no selection awareness of its own	62 "no", 4 "yes", 7 "unknown" — it reads the clipboard, it does not write it	46 "yes", 6 "partial", 14 "unknown" — the app only has to support Ctrl+C
selection-via-accessibility-API	68	live selection in applications that implement AX / UIA / AT-SPI text patterns	applications that expose no accessible text tree; canvas-drawn UIs	44 "no", 10 "yes" (those keep a copy fallback), 13 "unknown"	9 "yes", 19 "partial", 34 "unknown"
accessibility-tree-follow-focus	61	whatever has keyboard focus, continuously, without you selecting anything	anything the app does not report to the accessibility tree	37 "no", 21 "unknown"	4 "yes", 6 "partial", 32 "unknown", 14 "n/a"
OCR-screen-region	53	any pixels you can drag a box around, including images and video	anything off-screen or scrolled away; accuracy varies with font and contrast	23 "no", 7 "yes", 15 "unknown" — depends on whether capture routes via clipboard	30 "yes", 8 "n/a", 8 "unknown" — pixels do not care what toolkit drew them
selection-via-simulated-copy	51	any selection in any application that responds to a synthetic Ctrl+C / Cmd+C	selections in apps that block synthetic key events	39 "yes", 8 "no", 4 "unknown" — the defining cost of the mechanism	22 "yes", 16 "partial", 13 "unknown" — no row recorded "no"
unknown	44	— the project does not state how it acquires text	—	41 "unknown"	37 "unknown"
OCR-full-screen	13	the entire visible screen without you selecting a region	same off-screen limit, plus far more text than you asked for	9 "no", 2 "n/a"	3 "yes", 5 "n/a", 3 "unknown"
document-parse	3	a file you open — not the screen at all	anything on screen that is not in that file	1 "no", 1 "n/a", 1 "unknown"	2 "yes"

Three tallies circulated during drafting; this is the one that supersedes them. Earlier sections were written against counts computed over different subsets at different times — the 378 raw verified CORE rows, and a 370-row deduplication of them (which returned, for example, clipboard-watch 62 and AX-selection 57). The table above is computed over the full 448-row CORE band in FINAL.json after enum normalisation, and is the basis used throughout this document. The earlier figures are not retracted as errors of arithmetic — they are counts of smaller populations — but they should not be quoted alongside these.

Read as — the trade in one line each. Simulated-copy asks nothing of the application beyond responding to Ctrl+C / Cmd+C, which is why no row recorded "no" for Electron and terminals — and it overwrites your clipboard in 39 of its 51 rows. The accessibility API leaves the clipboard alone in 44 of 68 rows, but its behaviour inside Electron and terminals was recorded as "unknown" for 34 of 68, which is itself the finding: the projects do not state it, and it is the first thing to test on your own machine. OCR reaches text that no API will hand over — video, images, remote desktop sessions, DRM-locked readers — and 30 of 53 region-OCR entries were recorded as working in Electron and terminals, because it never asks the application anything. Clipboard-watch also asks nothing of the application, at the price of you pressing Ctrl+C yourself every time. Browser-DOM pays no clipboard cost in 76 of 82 rows and reaches nothing outside the tab.

A subset worth isolating, because it is the one with no clipboard cost and no OCR error rate. Of the 68 CORE rows acquiring the selection through an accessibility API, 44 record the clipboard as undisturbed, 39 run on macOS, and 19 are both on macOS and clipboard-safe [measured, own count over FINAL.json]. That 19 is the population a macOS user filtering on "does not touch my clipboard" is choosing from.

---

The bands, and why ADJACENT is not a demotion

Four bands sort the 1,553 entries. Every entry carries exactly one.

Band	Definition	Count
CORE-screen-or-selection-reader	Judged to own L1 and L2 — it can get text off the screen and a human can invoke it on what is on screen now	448
ENGINE-only	Judged to own L3/L4 with no screen acquisition and no human trigger — a caller supplies the string	279
ADJACENT	Owns some layers but not the L1+L2 pair; useful as a component, a back end, or a piece of the assembly	730
OUT-OF-BAND	Surfaced by the searches, does not address reading screen text at all	96

The bands describe scope, not quality. Nothing in the band label is a judgement about how well a tool does what it does. And, as set out above, the ENGINE-only definition is a statement about the banding judgement — 57 of those 279 rows still carry an acquisition or trigger tag in their raw layers field.

Three worked examples of software that is substantial and still lands ADJACENT:

• Umi-OCR, 46,472 stars [measured, gh api 2026-08-09], performs screenshot OCR and exposes an HTTP API — and does not speak. It owns L1 and L2 but not L3, so it is a recognition back end for a reader rather than a reader.
• Tesseract, 75,823 stars [measured, gh api 2026-08-09], is the recognition engine named in 21 of the 448 CORE rows [measured, own count over FINAL.json]. It has no capture UI, no trigger, and no speech.
• Hammerspoon, 15,901 stars [measured, gh api 2026-08-09], owns L2 and L3 on macOS and no acquisition of its own — which makes it the assembly kit that connects an extract-only OCR CLI to audible speech.

Read as: an ADJACENT entry is frequently the right thing to install alongside a CORE entry, or the thing a CORE entry already depends on. Piper appears inside the CORE tools ClipSpeak, Speech Note, Pied and sonata-nvda as their synthesis layer [measured, per the OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl row]. The band tells you which slot an entry fills. It does not tell you whether to use it.

Nothing found was discarded. Every entry surfaced across the four research phases is present in this catalogue, including the 96 OUT-OF-BAND rows that address a different problem entirely, the duplicates that were merged with their merge history recorded, and the entries whose evidence never rose above [lead]. Items that do not fit are labelled as not fitting and kept, so that a later reader can see what was considered and rejected rather than re-running the same searches to rediscover it.

What this section could not establish

• Whether a given tool survives inside Electron and terminal emulators is not stated by the projects themselves for 163 of the 448 CORE rows — 145 explicitly recorded as "unknown" plus 18 with the field blank [measured, own count over FINAL.json]. That is a gap in the upstream documentation, not a gap that further reading would close; it is a per-machine test.
• Clipboard behaviour is undetermined for 118 of the 448 CORE rows (105 "unknown", 13 blank) — typically closed-source or store-distributed tools with no source to read.
• The acquisition mechanism itself is undetermined for 44 of the 448 CORE rows: the project documents that it reads your selection and does not document how.
• The layer tags outside the CORE band were never re-verified against primary sources. The 57 ENGINE-only rows carrying an L1 or L2 tag are declared above rather than corrected, because correcting them would mean asserting a re-reading that was not performed.
• Star counts, install counts and rating counts are three different units and are not made comparable anywhere in this document.
• The layer assignments come from READMEs, documentation and store listings, not from running the software. A README that claims a global hotkey has been recorded as owning L2 without that hotkey being pressed.

02-platform-mechanics.md

Platform mechanics — why the same tool behaves differently on each OS

The catalogue's acquisition column names what a tool does to get text. This section is the why underneath it. Every entry reaches text by one of three physical routes, and each OS permits, restricts or forbids those routes differently. A tool that works on Windows and does nothing on macOS is usually not broken — it is a tool whose route the other platform does not offer.

Route	What it actually does	Costs the clipboard?	Sees non-text pixels?
Accessibility-tree read	Asks the focused app, through an OS API, "what text is selected?"	No	No
Clipboard (watch, or simulated copy)	Reads a shared OS buffer, or forces the app to fill it by sending Ctrl+C / Cmd+C	Watch: no. Simulated copy: yes	No
OCR of pixels	Screenshots a region and recognises glyphs	No	Yes

Counting basis for every catalogue figure in this section. All counts below are taken from FINAL.json, restricted to rows whose fit_band is CORE-screen-or-selection-reader, n = 448. Free-text values that had escaped the field enums were normalised before counting (459 acquisition values, 647 platform lists), with the raw strings preserved in *_raw fields. Blank fields are folded into unknown. Earlier drafts of this document circulated two other tallies, computed over different subsets at different moments; those are superseded and should not be used.

Acquisition method across the 448 CORE rows: browser-DOM 82, clipboard-watch 73, selection-via-accessibility-API 68, accessibility-tree-follow-focus 61, OCR-screen-region 53, selection-via-simulated-copy 51, unknown 44, OCR-full-screen 13, document-parse 3 [measured, own count over FINAL.json 2026-08-09]. Grouping those into the three physical routes: clipboard routes 124, accessibility-tree routes 129, OCR routes 66, browser-DOM 82, document-parse 3, unknown 44. On the cost side, 60 CORE rows destroy the existing clipboard against 261 that do not (unknown 105, not-recorded 13, n/a 9) [measured, same basis].

For orientation, the catalogue as a whole is 1,553 unique entries: CORE 448, ADJACENT 730, ENGINE-only 279, OUT-OF-BAND 96 [measured].

---

macOS

The AX route. The non-destructive path is AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue asking a focused element for kAXSelectedTextAttribute, documented in Apple's AXUIElement.h reference [measured — API existence]. The call returns whatever the application chose to publish into its accessibility tree. Nothing forces an application to publish anything.

How much of the catalogue rests on this route: 68 CORE rows use selection-via-accessibility-API; 44 of those record the clipboard as undisturbed; 39 of the 68 list macOS as a platform; 19 rows are both macOS and clipboard-safe [measured, FINAL.json CORE band].

Why it returns nothing in Chrome and in Electron applications. For these two — and only these two — there is a documented cause, and it is not a macOS defect. It is an explicit performance gate in Chromium, whose accessibility documentation states: "For performance reasons Chromium waits until it detects the presence of assistive technology before enabling full support for accessibility APIs," with the Mac trigger being "whether it sees a client, such as VoiceOver, has set the AXEnhancedUserInterface attribute on the main application window" (chromium.org accessibility design doc) [measured]. The same page names two overrides: --force-renderer-accessibility, or chrome://accessibility [measured].

Electron is a Chromium-family process, inherits that gate, and adds a second key that third-party code can set from outside: "third-party assistive technology can toggle accessibility features inside Electron applications by setting the AXManualAccessibility attribute programmatically" — AXUIElementSetAttributeValue(axApp, "AXManualAccessibility", true) — alongside the in-app app.setAccessibilitySupportEnabled(enabled) API, with the caveat that "the user's system assistive utilities have priority over this setting and will override it" (electronjs.org accessibility tutorial) [measured]. Those are the two opt-ins: AXManualAccessibility set on the target process by the reader, or AXEnhancedUserInterface set the way VoiceOver sets it.

Terminal emulators are a separate case, and the cause was NOT established. Terminal.app, iTerm2 and Ghostty are not Chromium processes, so the gate above does not explain them, and this pass found no primary source — from Apple or from any of those three projects — stating what a terminal emulator publishes as selected text over the accessibility API, or why a reader gets an empty string from one. Do not carry the Chromium explanation across; it does not apply. The one source-level data point found is about Ghostty specifically and comes from a third-party reader's code comment, not from Ghostty: the Yapper project's Yapper/Sources/Yapper/TextSelection.swift carries, at line 6, "Terminals with copy-on-select (Ghostty) put a finished selection on the pasteboard immediately, but TUI apps that redraw constantly (Claude Code) clear the visible selection before our Cmd+C lands" (ACNoonan/yapper, MIT, Swift, 0 stars, created 2026-05-14) [community — one developer's assertion, quoted verbatim from the source file]. Read as: for Ghostty, at least one implementer concluded the clipboard rather than the accessibility tree is where the selection lands, and built a 20-second pasteboard window around it. That is a lead about one emulator, not a rule about terminals, and it was not tested here.

Read as (Chromium family only): a macOS selection reader that queries kAXSelectedText and gets an empty string from an Electron app has not failed — it has failed to announce itself. Whether any catalogued tool performs that announcement is a per-tool question, recorded under works_in_electron_or_terminal, which across the 448 CORE rows reads: unknown 145, yes 118, n/a 70, partial 49, no 48, not-recorded 18 [measured].

The TCC permission model. Any process making AX calls against another process needs a grant. On the machine this research ran on (macOS 26.5, build 25F71), the system database /Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db carries 24 rows for kTCCServiceAccessibility, 15 for kTCCServiceScreenCapture, 4 for kTCCServiceListenEvent and 3 for kTCCServicePostEvent, each with an auth_value of 2 (granted) or 0 (denied) [measured, sqlite3 read 2026-08-09]. Practically: a selection reader needs Accessibility; an OCR reader needs Screen Recording (kTCCServiceScreenCapture); a tool that simulates Cmd+C also needs the event-posting grant. Three separate toggles, granted per-binary.

The Services route, which is not the AX route. macOS ships a selection reader in /System/Library/Services. Measured on this machine: SpeechService.service exists, and pbs -dump contains two entries under com.apple.speech.SpeechService — Speech/Start Speaking Text with NSMessage doSpeakSelectedText, and Speech/Stop Speaking with doStopSpeaking; both carry NSSendTypes (NSStringPboardType) and an empty NSKeyEquivalent, so there is no default chord and one must be assigned under Keyboard Shortcuts > Services (Apple: Use services in apps) [measured]. Reproducibility note: pbs is not on PATH; it lives at /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs, and a bare pbs -dump fails. The mechanism matters: a Service receives the selection over a per-service pasteboard handed to it by the OS, not the general pasteboard, so it does not clobber what the user copied. The Automator route (Automator User Guide) uses the same plumbing — a Quick Action set to "receive selected text in any application," running the Speak Text action or a say script [derived — Apple does not document this workflow end to end].

Spoken Content. Apple's Have your Mac speak text out loud: "You can have your Mac speak the text you select on the screen whenever you press a keyboard shortcut. If no text is selected, available text items in the current window are spoken," with Option-Esc as the default [measured]. Its configuration lives in com.apple.speech.synthesis.general.prefs, which on this machine holds exactly two keys — SpokenUIUseSpeakingHotKeyFlag = 1 and SpokenUIUseSpeakingHotKeyCombo = 617 [measured, defaults read 2026-08-09]. The combo is an opaque integer, not a readable chord string, which is why scripting a change to this shortcut is awkward. A second domain, com.apple.universalaccess, holds the surrounding switches (speakSelectionEnabled, speakSelectionHighlightOptions, speakItemUnderMouseEnabled) [measured].

The universalaccessd caching question — NOT ESTABLISHED. The daemon is real and running (/usr/sbin/universalaccessd, pid observed 2026-08-09) [measured]. The claim that it caches its hotkey binding, so a defaults write does not apply until the daemon restarts, is not confirmed by any source found in this pass. The only related evidence found is a BetterTouchTool community post suggesting kill $(pgrep universalaccessd) to make a different accessibility setting apply (community.folivora.ai thread 39245) [community — about hover-typing, not speech]; lsof on the daemon showed no open handle on the speech preference plist, which is weak evidence either way since cfprefsd mediates preference reads [measured, one observation]. Treat the restart step as folklore that may work, not documented behaviour.

Synthesis and voices. /usr/bin/say takes text on argv, from -f file, or on stdin — no screen-acquisition layer at all, which is why the catalogue bands it ENGINE-only rather than CORE. (Band and raw layer annotation disagree on this row: say is one of 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows that still carry an L1-ACQUIRE or L2-TRIGGER tag in their layers field, generally because they read a file or a caller-supplied argument. The band is the considered judgement; the layer list is the raw annotation. That mismatch was never re-checked, because the verification pass covered the CORE band only — 2 of the 448 CORE rows are likewise missing one of L1/L2. [measured, own count over FINAL.json; declared defect, not silently corrected].) On this machine say -v '?' lists 184 voices, and both download trees are present: /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_VoiceServices_CombinedVocalizerVoices for Enhanced and Premium voices, ..._VoiceServices_CustomVoice for Personal Voice [measured]. The programmatic equivalent is AVSpeechSynthesizer, which adds the per-utterance callback willSpeakRangeOfSpeechString — the word ranges a highlighting reader needs — and gates Personal Voice behind requestPersonalVoiceAuthorization on macOS 14 or later [measured — API existence]. Personal Voice is reported not to appear in say -v '?', so the CLI and the framework may not expose the same voice set [lead — not re-verified this pass].

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Windows

The non-destructive route is IUIAutomationTextPattern::GetSelection, which Microsoft describes as retrieving "a collection of text ranges that represents the currently selected text in a text-based control," with the Remarks warning that "If the control does not contain a text insertion point or does not support text selection, ranges is set to NULL" (Microsoft Learn) [measured]. Beneath it sits MSAA/IAccessible, with IAccessible2 as the third-party extension; the stack's entry point is Microsoft's UI Automation overview. Windows is named as a platform by 198 of the 448 CORE rows, against macOS 134, browser-extension 95, Linux-unspecified 48, Linux-X11 40, Android 28, Linux-Wayland 28, iOS 16, web 4, headless-server 3, unknown-legacy 2 (a row may name several) [measured].

Chromium gates accessibility on Windows too, by a different mechanism: it "calls NotifyWinEvent with EVENT_SYSTEM_ALERT and the custom object id of 1. If it subsequently receives a WM_GETOBJECT call for that custom object id, it assumes that assistive technology is running" [measured, chromium.org]. That same page's API table lists MSAA and IAccessible2 as complete but "IAccessibleEx and UI Automation (very limited)". That table is stale on the UIA point: Chromium ships a documented runtime bridge letting an IA2 client convert to a UIA element via IUIAutomationItemContainerPattern::FindItemByProperty, and back via IUIAutomationLegacyIAccessiblePattern::GetIAccessible (chromium/docs/accessibility/browser/ia2_to_uia.md) [measured]. Read as: on Windows, Chrome is reachable by a tree-reading client once accessibility is switched on; on macOS the same browser requires an attribute to be set on it first. That asymmetry, not the tool, is why a cross-platform selection reader has a good Windows day and a bad macOS day.

Why simulated Ctrl+C persists anyway. The AutoHotkey pattern circulating on forums is four lines: ^w:: send ^c / clipwait,0 / v := ComObjCreate("SAPI.SpVoice") / v.Speak(clipboard) [measured, verbatim repost at r/AutoHotkey]. There is no save-and-restore step, so the prior clipboard is destroyed; and because Ctrl+C is interrupt in Windows console hosts rather than copy, the same script behaves differently in a terminal than in an Electron window [measured]. The non-clipboard alternative, ControlGet, Selected, works only when the focused control's class matches Edit\d+ — which is why the answer documenting it ships a clipboard-backup fallback for everything else (Stack Overflow 36067563) [measured; stackoverflow.com returns 403 to scripted fetches, so this was verified against the on-disk corpus — a reader following the link in a browser will reach it, a script will not]. Read as: simulated copy survives on Windows because it is the one route with no per-application prerequisite — it works against any window that responds to Ctrl+C, at the price of the user's clipboard.

Two synthesis stacks, not one. SAPI 5 registers voices under one registry hive; Windows.Media.SpeechSynthesis.SpeechSynthesizer exposes the OneCore set (Speech_OneCore key) and returns an audio stream the caller plays itself [measured]. Voices visible in Settings > Time & language > Speech can therefore be absent from a SAPI-only application. Narrator's natural voices are a third, download-on-demand tier: Microsoft's guide gives the flow as Ctrl+Windows+N to reach Narrator settings, then the Add button under "Add natural voices" — "You can install all voices, but you must install each one independently" (Narrator Appendix A) [measured].

Narrator's own architecture is a follow-focus UIA client: Win+Ctrl+Enter starts and stops it, and "Both the Caps lock key and the Insert key serve as your Narrator key by default" (Complete guide to Narrator) [measured]. Its read-the-selection command is Narrator+Shift+Down arrow (Appendix B, revision 2026-06-24) [measured]. Refutation stated explicitly: a Super User answer (id 1215938, score 3, not accepted) lists Ctrl+Shift+Space and Ctrl+Alt+Space as Narrator selection commands. Appendix B contains no Spacebar command at all, and an archived Microsoft shortcuts page (Wayback capture 2018-10-12) shows Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar three times, every one under Magnifier [measured] — that answer appears to have mixed Magnifier keys into a Narrator list.

How third-party code reaches speech without starting a second voice. NVDA ships a DLL, the NVDA Controller Client, letting any process push a string into a running NVDA's speech queue at the user's configured rate. Its readme records the versioning: v2.0 (NVDA 2024.1) added nvdaController_getProcessId and nvdaController_speakSsml; v3.0 (NVDA 2026.3) added nvdaController_isSpeaking; older builds return RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF (1717) for newer calls [measured]. Java, Dart and Node.js bindings appear in the catalogue as separate rows.

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Linux — the split that decides everything

X11. The selection is already public before anyone copies anything. The freedesktop clipboard specification quotes the ICCCM for the definitions of the three selections — PRIMARY, SECONDARY, CLIPBOARD — and then gives, in its own voice under "Application authors should follow the following guidelines to get correct behavior," the rule "selecting but with no explicit copy should only set PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD"; the same page describes the division as "CLIPBOARD works just like the clipboard on Mac or Windows; it only changes on explicit cut/copy. PRIMARY is an 'easter egg' for expert users" [measured]. The guideline is a freedesktop convention, not a protocol-level requirement: the same page complains that "many apps don't follow the conventional behavior" [measured]. Read as: on X11 a reader can call xsel -p (or xclip -o -selection primary) and get the current selection with no accessibility permission, no simulated keystroke, and no damage to the user's copied text — the only route in this section that needs none of those three prerequisites, and a property of X11's design rather than of any tool. It usually holds rather than always holds, because the applications, not the protocol, decide. 37 catalogue rows mention xsel, 22 mention xclip [measured].

Wayland removes it. An unfocused Wayland client cannot read a selection through ordinary protocol. Two privileged extensions restore the capability, both opening with the same sentence: "This protocol allows a privileged client to control data devices. In particular, the client will be able to manage the current selection and take the role of a clipboard manager" (ext-data-control-v1) [measured]. The older wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 now carries its own note: "This protocol is deprecated and not intended for production use. For clipboard management, use the ext-data-control-v1 protocol" [measured].

Compositor status, read from the source trees on 2026-08-09. Every file path and line number below is given so a reader can re-check it against the same repositories:

Compositor	Background selection read	Evidence [all measured, read from source 2026-08-09]
wlroots (Sway, and derivatives)	Both protocols	The tree ships both types/wlr_data_control_v1.c and types/wlr_ext_data_control_v1.c (wlroots)
KWin (KDE Plasma)	ext-data-control	src/wayland/datacontrol{device,devicemanager,offer,source}_v1.cpp, built against staging/ext-data-control/ext-data-control-v1.xml, which is named at line 52 of src/wayland/CMakeLists.txt
Hyprland	Both protocols	protocolnew("protocols" "wlr-data-control-unstable-v1") at line 565 and protocolnew("staging/ext-data-control" "ext-data-control-v1") at line 612 of CMakeLists.txt
Mutter (GNOME)	Neither	The wayland_protocols list at line 1025 of mutter src/meson.build contains no data-control entry of either kind; it does contain ['primary-selection', 'unstable', 1, ] at line 1043, which serves focused clients only

GNOME's only remaining route is private D-Bus: org.gnome.Mutter.Clipboard offers Enable, Disable, SetSelection, SelectionRead, SelectionWrite, SelectionWriteDone, SelectionTransfer and a SelectionOwnerChanged signal (mutter dbus-interfaces) [measured]. A KDE-specific workaround also circulates — reading Klipper over qdbus org.kde.klipper /klipper getClipboardContents [lead, Russian-language forum thread]. 28 CORE rows name Wayland as a platform [measured].

The hotkey is a second, separate privileged operation. A Wayland application cannot grab a global key by itself. The sanctioned route is the GlobalShortcuts portal, documented at version 2, whose shortcuts fire "regardless of the focused state of the application window," and whose BindShortcuts call "will typically result the portal presenting a dialog showing the shortcuts and allowing users to configure the shortcuts" [measured]. Backends implementing it [measured]: src/globalshortcuts.c in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, src/globalshortcuts.cpp in xdg-desktop-portal-kde, src/portals/GlobalShortcuts.cpp in xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland. The src/ directory of xdg-desktop-portal-wlr — the backend a plain Sway install uses — contains exactly core, screencast and screenshot, with no shortcuts backend [measured]. Read as: on Sway the hotkey comes from the compositor config (bindsym), which invokes a command directly; that works, but a tool assuming the portal finds nothing to talk to. Screen-OCR readers hit the same fragmentation one layer over, via the Screenshot and ScreenCast portals.

The tree route. AT-SPI2 is the D-Bus accessibility bus; its org.a11y.atspi.Text interface exposes GetNSelections and GetSelection alongside the text and caret accessors (xml/Text.xml) [measured]. Anything on Linux asking "what is selected in the focused app" ends here — or gets nothing, because a toolkit that does not expose AT-SPI is invisible to it. Orca's README states it "works with applications and toolkits that support the assistive technology service provider interface (AT-SPI)" [measured, Orca v51.rc].

The broker layer. Linux readers rarely talk to a synthesiser directly; they talk to Speech Dispatcher, which multiplexes clients onto pluggable modules. Its src/modules directory carries 26 module source files — among them espeak.c, festival.c, flite.c, pico.c, ibmtts.c, ivona.c, kali.cpp, openjtalk.c, cxxpiper.cpp, and generic.c, which wraps any command-line synthesiser (brailcom/speechd) [measured]. 52 catalogue rows reference speech-dispatcher [measured]. Read as: on Linux, "which voice do I get" is a speech-dispatcher configuration question, not usually a property of the reader.

The KDE stack has a gap its own maintainers described. KTTSD's successor Jovie has been dormant since 2017 [measured]. Jeremy Whiting's 2021 statement of what replaced it: notifications go through QtSpeech per-application; "Want to read a document out loud? Use Okular's QtSpeech actions in it's menu. It sends either the selected text or the current page to be spoken to Speech-Dispatcher"; type-and-say goes to spd-say, espeak/festival, or KMouth (kde-accessibility list, October 2021) [measured]. In the same thread a vision-impaired user names the residual gap — he used Jovie "periodically to read out error messages, text boxes etc ... for which I don't have an adequate substitute" [community]. All three supported paths are document-scoped, notification-scoped or type-and-say; an arbitrary on-screen selection has no KDE-native reader. Okular's Speak Text also does nothing until qtspeech5-speechd-plugin (Qt5) or qt6-speech-speechd-plugin (Qt6) is installed [measured] — a silent failure worth knowing before concluding the feature is broken. QTextToSpeech is the abstraction above all of it, mapping onto SAPI/WinRT, AVSpeechSynthesizer, and speech-dispatcher or Flite by platform.

---

Browsers

The Web Speech API's SpeechSynthesis interface provides getVoices, speak, pause, resume, cancel, and the SpeechSynthesisUtterance boundary events that browser readers use to drive word-level highlighting [measured]. What getVoices() returns is a host property, not a browser one: it surfaces whatever voices the OS and browser expose, and on Chrome some entries are Google network voices rather than local ones — so identical extension code can be offline-capable in one browser and network-dependent in another [measured]. In the catalogue, 95 of the 448 CORE rows name browser-extension as a platform, and 82 acquire via browser-DOM [measured, FINAL.json CORE band].

Why an extension cannot read outside its own tab is a consequence of the match-pattern system, not a policy choice per extension. A match pattern's scheme "Must be one of the following: http, https, a wildcard * which matches only http or https, or file"; <all_urls> "Matches any URL that starts with a permitted scheme"; and file:/// "requires the user to manually grant access" (Chrome for Developers, match patterns) [measured]. The addressable universe is URLs; no pattern names a native window, a PDF viewer outside the browser, a terminal, or an IDE. Read as: every browser-extension row in the catalogue is scope-limited to the browser by construction — a structural ceiling, not a maturity gap.

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Remote desktop

Every claim in this part is spec-reading. No tool in this catalogue was tested against a live RDP or Citrix session in this research. That caveat applies to all four points below.

(a) The AX/UIA route does not cross the link, and the plugin route is closed from a macOS client. RDP carries a framebuffer plus virtual channels and defines no accessibility channel. A local accessibility client querying the RDP client window therefore receives the window, not the remote document: kAXSelectedText on a macOS client returns nothing for text inside the session [derived]. The supporting measurement is structural. In Microsoft's Compare the features of the Remote Desktop clients, the row "Third-party virtual channel plugins" is marked supported (✅) for the Windows MSI and MSTSC clients only, and unsupported (❌) for the Windows Store client, macOS, iOS/iPadOS, Android/ChromeOS and Web — in all three client tables on the page [measured, table read 2026-08-09]. NVDA's rdAccess and the JAWS remote-speech add-ons are exactly third-party virtual channel plugins, so that single row rules both of them out from a macOS client. A second, independent reason closes the same door: rdAccess's own readme requires "RDAccess on both a client and server copy of NVDA", plus Windows registry changes to load it into mstsc or Citrix Workspace (rdAccess readme) [measured] — and NVDA does not run on macOS. Read as: of the three ways to get remote text spoken locally, this one — a plugin carrying accessibility data over its own virtual channel — is shut for a macOS client. The clipboard route (b) and the audio route (d) remain open.

(b) The clipboard route DOES cross the link, by default, on macOS — and this refutes two rows in this catalogue's own earlier passes. The same Microsoft table has two separate clipboard rows, and which footnote sits on which row changes the reading. Reading the table structure directly [measured, 2026-08-09]:

• The row labelled "Clipboard - unidirectional³" carries superscript 3. Footnote 3 reads "macOS support is native in the Remote Desktop client. All other platforms require remote session configuration," and its "For more information" link goes to Configure the clipboard transfer direction — that footnote is about the unidirectional configuration, not the bidirectional row.
• The row labelled "Clipboard - bidirectional" carries no footnote on its macOS cell at all — a bare ✅. In the same row, iOS/iPadOS carries footnote 1, "Text and images only," and Android/ChromeOS and Web carry footnote 2, "Text only."

"Clipboard - bidirectional" row	macOS	iOS/iPadOS	Android/ChromeOS	Web
Cell contents as printed	✅, no footnote	✅¹ "Text and images only."	✅² "Text only."	✅² "Text only."

Read as: macOS is the only non-Windows client whose bidirectional clipboard cell carries no format restriction — the qualifications that narrow iOS, Android and the web client to text, or to text and images, are absent there. The feature itself is defined on the same page as "Redirect the clipboard on the local device is to the remote session and from the remote session to the local device" [measured]. The wire mechanism is MS-RDPECLIP: on copy, a Format List PDU crosses from the endpoint whose clipboard changed and "Virtual Channel Endpoint B updates System Clipboard B" before any paste happens, the bytes delay-rendered until requested [measured]. Refutation stated explicitly: two catalogue rows from an earlier pass assert that "the remote content is a bitmap, so only OCR reaches it" (the Windows UIA/SAPI platform row) and "OCR is the only local acquisition route into a remote session" (the FreeRDP row). Both are wrong as stated. Copying inside the session puts the text on the macOS pasteboard, where any of the 73 CORE rows whose acquisition method is clipboard-watch can read it. OCR is the fallback for text that cannot be selected inside the session — an image, a rendered PDF, a legacy control — not the only route into it. The cost the spec implies is latency: the client learns the format is available promptly, then pays a server round trip for the bytes [measured].

(c) A managed Citrix estate is a different situation and must not be conflated with personal RDP. Citrix's policy documentation gives bidirectional clipboard as the default ("Client clipboard redirection: Enabled (Default)") plus two unidirectional modes. The one that breaks a clipboard-watching reader is Restrict client clipboard write: with it enabled, "clipboard data is permitted to flow exclusively from the user's endpoint device (client) to the remote Citrix session... but they cannot copy data from the Citrix session and paste it back to their local machine" (Citrix clipboard redirection configuration) [vendor]. The complementary setting, Restrict session clipboard write, allows session-to-client and blocks the reverse — under that one a reader on the client still works. A separate Clipboard Format policy can restrict permitted formats to text-based data only [vendor]. Correction to an earlier catalogue row: it attributed the session-to-client block to "Restrict session clipboard write"; per the page above it is "Restrict client clipboard write" that removes that direction. The names are near-mirror images and easy to swap. Read as: on a personal RDP box the user controls this; in a managed estate an administrator does, and OCR then genuinely becomes the remaining local route.

(d) The third configuration: put the reader inside the session. MS-RDPEA is the "Remote Desktop Protocol: Audio Output Virtual Channel Extension, which transfers audio data from the server to the client" [measured], and the client comparison table marks "Speakers" supported on every client platform including macOS [measured]. A TTS engine running on the remote machine, reading the remote selection with the remote OS's own accessibility API, is therefore audible locally over a documented, default-on channel — no accessibility problem to solve, because acquisition and synthesis both happen where the text lives. This is the route that stays open when (a) is closed by the plugin row and (c) is closed by an administrator.

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Declared gaps

• The cause of accessibility silence in terminal emulators was not established. The Chromium performance gate explains Chromium-family processes (Chrome, Electron) and nothing else; Terminal.app, iTerm2 and Ghostty are not Chromium. No primary source from Apple or from those projects was found describing what a terminal publishes as selected text over the accessibility API. The single Ghostty data point above is a third-party developer's code comment, not a project statement, and was not tested.
• Nothing here was tested against a live remote session. Points (a) through (d) are read from Microsoft and Citrix documentation and protocol specs. Behaviour of any specific catalogued tool over RDP or Citrix is unverified.
• The universalaccessd hotkey-caching claim is unconfirmed. No Apple or third-party technical source was found stating the daemon caches the binding.
• works_in_electron_or_terminal is unknown or not-recorded for 163 of the 448 CORE rows (unknown 145, not-recorded 18; against yes 118, n/a 70, partial 49, no 48). The Chromium and Electron opt-in mechanisms explain why the answer varies per application; they do not give the answer for any given application without testing it. Blank fields are folded into unknown in every count in this section.
• Acquisition method is unknown for 44 of the 448 CORE rows, and clipboard cost is unknown or not-recorded for 118. Route totals in the opening tally are therefore lower bounds, not complete partitions.
• Band and layer annotations disagree for 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows and 2 of the 448 CORE rows. The verification pass covered the CORE band only, so ENGINE-only layer tags were never re-checked. Disclosed above rather than silently corrected.
• macOS Spoken Content's own app coverage was not tested. Apple's page does not name the underlying API and does not say which applications expose selectable text to it.
• SpokenUIUseSpeakingHotKeyCombo = 617 was recorded verbatim, not decoded.
• Compositor support was read from source trees on 2026-08-09. Distribution packages may lag those trees. wayland.app's per-compositor tables are rendered client-side and were unreadable by the scraper, so the table above rests on the implementations themselves, not a third-party index.
• Firefox's Linux voice supply was not verified. It is understood to route through speech-dispatcher; no primary source was read to confirm it.

03-community-reception.md

Community reception

What people who run these tools say about them: 1,016 records across six venue files, 986 unique source URLs, collated into 164 per-tool summaries [measured] — own count over the six files sentiment-hackernews.json, sentiment-youtube.json, sentiment-at-forums.json, sentiment-issue-trackers.json, sentiment-reddit-accessibility-full.json and sentiment-reddit-tech.json. A repository sweep tells you a project exists, is MIT-licensed and was pushed last week. It cannot tell you that its phonemizer mispronounces German, that its 25 MB model pulls a 6 GB dependency tree, or that the people who read at 700 words per minute rejected the architectural direction it belongs to.

A tally correction, stated up front. Figures of "~1,300 records" circulated during drafting. They double-counted sentiment-reddit-accessibility.json (174 rows), which is a strict subset of sentiment-reddit-accessibility-full.json (208 rows) with 0 URLs unique to the subset. 1,016 / 986 is the figure this section uses throughout [measured].

Evidence labels used inline: [community] a user report, quoted and linked; [vendor] a project's or company's own unchecked claim; [measured] something read directly out of the corpus or a primary source; [derived] an inference of mine; [lead] found but unverified. Interpretation is fenced under Read as: so you can delete those lines and the facts still stand.

A citation warning that applies in four places below. AppleVis is behind a Cloudflare bot challenge. Every applevis.com URL returns a "Just a moment…" interstitial with HTTP 403 to a scripted fetch, with and without browser headers [measured, re-tested 2026-08-09]. The AppleVis quotes here were captured into the corpus during collection and are reproduced verbatim from it, but a reader clicking those links may be blocked too; they resolve in an ordinary interactive browser session. Each AppleVis citation below is marked (AppleVis — bot-walled, see the warning above).

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1. The open contradiction: does the blind community's verdict transfer to a dyslexic reader?

The catalogue cannot resolve this, and it should not be presented as resolved. What follows is grouped as two positions because that is how the corpus argues, but one record cuts across the grouping entirely — a blind screen-reader user asking for neural synthesis and blocked only by latency. It carries first-party latency measurements and is set out at the end of this part.

Position A — classical formant synthesis preferred, reported by blind screen-reader users

Three distinct properties, claimed by different people in different threads.

Latency. ClawsOnPaws, a daily screen-reader user, quantified the gap: "Eloquence and ESpeak react pretty much instantly whereas other voices might take 100 MS or so. This is a very big deal for me. Just like how one would like instant visual feedback on their screen, it's the same for me with speech" [community] (HN, 2021-09-25). tapper, who states he is blind and uses NVDA, put the domain constraint in one line to the Kitten TTS authors: "FYI blind people do not like any lag when reading that's is why so many still use eloquence and espeak" [community] (HN, 2025-08-06). miki123211 named where the latency accumulates on Linux — an IPC or process-creation boundary around eSpeak — because "if the speech synthesizer speaks each time you press a key … every bit of latency matters" [community] (HN, 2021-09-25).

Predictability. ClawsOnPaws also named the mechanism that latency alone does not explain: "Neural TTS always has differences in how they say a thing, and at times, those differences can be large enough to trip me up" [community] (HN, 2024-05-02), and in a later thread: "more synthetic voices like Eloquence are easier to understand at high speeds especially because of their 'formulaic' nature. You don't listen to each individual phoneme or letter, you listen more for groups of syllables, tone, etc. The more unpredictable the text to speech, the harder this is" [community] (HN, 2026-01-23).

The speeds this sustains. "Daily normal is 600wpm", rising to 1200 wpm on low-density text — trwm's figures, not ClawsOnPaws's (HN 40234786); "averaging out at about 730 words per minute" on Eloquence (r/Blind); "over 700 words per minute … about 4× audiobook speed" (r/Blind); espeak "can be sped up to 1k wpm and still be understandable", paired with tesseract OCR for ~30,000 words in a 45-minute sitting (HN 28652917). All [community].

Corroborated outside HN — and the same witness names the boundary as speed, not age. An assistive-technology trainer on r/Blind, writing to someone setting up a computer for a relative losing her sight, recommends neural voices first: "Find some voices she can cope with. The default windows ones are quite poor. My older adults prefer the Neural voices from this page. Download that file and, with NVDA running, double-click it and install." Formant synthesis is offered only as the fallback for people who want more speed: "If she finds that that sort of voice is too slow, the more robotic-sounding ones (eSpeak, Eloquence, DECtalk and Orpheus) are preferred by those who've been blind longer and use the voice as data provider rather than book reader" [community] (r/Blind, 2024-06-29, comment read in full at source 2026-08-09). A blind NVDA user on r/LocalLLaMA named the same ceiling from inside the neural-model community: small non-autoregressive models are the route, "but even then it won't satisfy the speed adicts having their Eloquence on 200% speed because neural is ment for natural speech rates" [community] (r/LocalLLaMA).

Correction to an earlier draft of this section. The trainer's comment was previously quoted from "the more robotic-sounding ones…" onward, under a heading reading "old formant synthesis preferred". That cut reversed his position: his default recommendation is neural, and formant is his conditional fallback. The full quotation is restored above.

Position B — modern neural voices preferred, reported first-hand by dyslexic readers

barfbagginus reported the inverse of Position A, in the same 2024 eSpeak thread, and paired it with a second condition: "I depend on TTS to overcome dyslexia, but I also struggle with auditory processing disorder that causes me to misunderstand words. As a result, classical TTS does not help me read faster or more accurately than struggling through my dyslexia. It causes me to rapidly fatigue, zone out, and rewind often, in a way that is more severe than when I sight read. On the other hand, modern neural TTS is a huge enabler" [community] (HN, 2024-05-02).

Two further first-hand dyslexic reports point the same way, from different venues and years:

• A physical response to formant-era voices: "listening to a non generetive voice, like those robotic voices from the 2010s gives me a headache after like 30 mins. Not that this is much better usually losing focus at like 2 hours or so" [community] (r/Dyslexia, 2026-07-27).
• A dyslexic r/audiobooks commenter on Speechify: "I'm dyslexic and have had hard time throughout my life consuming written material. This tool has some of the best voices and is comfortable to listen too for a long period of time. A lot of these tools seem to be aimed at visual impaired users from my experience and read EVERYTHING" [community] (r/audiobooks, comment read in full at source 2026-08-09).

The within-dyslexia split — first-hand on both sides

r/Dyslexia also carries working reports of SAPI-era classical tools from dyslexic users: Balabolka — "Balabolka is what I use. You have to configure it to they way you want but it's very customizable" [community] (r/Dyslexia) — and MyStudyBar — "It's super basic but it's easy to use and super reliable" [community] (r/Dyslexia).

So the split runs inside the dyslexia population on first-hand reports alone: the 30-minute-headache report against two reliable-classical-tool reports.

How "first-hand dyslexic" is being counted here, applied evenly. Only two commenters in the whole corpus self-identify as dyslexic in the quoted text: barfbagginus (HN 40238926) and the r/audiobooks commenter ("I'm dyslexic and have had hard time throughout my life"). The three r/Dyslexia comments above — p019irt, hwalqr5, nb3mmnv — are counted as first-hand reports on subreddit membership alone; none states its author's diagnosis in the comment itself. That is a weaker basis than self-identification, and it is the same standard under which greenyouse was excluded below — so it is stated here rather than left implicit. A reader who rejects membership-as-evidence should read the within-dyslexia split as resting on one report per side, not three.

A comment previously mis-filed here. An earlier draft placed HN 15506074 — greenyouse, parsing about 400 wpm through xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400 — on the classical side of a within-dyslexia split. Read at source via the HN Firebase API on 2026-08-09, that comment says "My reading speed is painfully slow but with espeak or a screen reader I can parse about 400 wpm" and, separately, "I have a relative with dyslexia and it was a helpful hack for him to get reading faster too." greenyouse describes himself as a slow reader, not as dyslexic, and the dyslexia element is second-hand about a relative. It is a real report that classical synthesis at 400 wpm worked for a slow reader; it is not a first-hand data point inside the dyslexia population, and it is not used as one here.

The record that cuts across both positions

aradix85 states he is blind and uses NVDA — squarely the population of Position A — and filed a still-open Kokoro issue asking for neural synthesis, blocked only by latency [community] (hexgrad/kokoro#291, opened 2025-12-20, still open 2026-08-09, issue body read at source):

"I'm blind and use NVDA (a screen reader). I've been testing Kokoro to see if it could replace the 20+ year old TTS engines we currently use (eSpeak, Tiflotecnica/old Nuance). The voice quality difference is night and day - but latency is a blocker."

His own measurements, on a Core Ultra 7 258V with 32 GB RAM and an Intel Arc 140V GPU: FP32 ONNX on CPU ~500 ms for a short phrase, INT8 ONNX ~1100 ms ("wrong codepath?"), OpenVINO GPU failed on dynamic STFT shapes. He states the requirement and the comparison as "Target latency: <200ms on average laptop CPU (i5/Ryzen 5, no GPU)" and "Reference: eSpeak achieves 5-10ms, Tiflotecnica ~50-150ms." On why his use is different: "Most TTS use cases (audiobooks, podcasts, video narration) tolerate 500ms+ latency easily. Screen readers are unique: we generate thousands of tiny utterances per hour ('button', 'edit', 'link', 'checkbox checked'). Each must feel instant or navigation becomes unbearable." And on his own framing of why the classical engines persist: "The blind community is stuck with 20-year-old robotic voices because neural TTS is too slow." Offered Piper as the low-latency option, he replied "Yes I have tried piper. It is not better then what exists while the voices that are used by kokoro are much better then what is available for screenreader users".

Read as: the two positions may not be arguing about the same task, and the disagreement is not blind-versus-dyslexic. Position A describes a keystroke-response instrument run at four to eight times speech rate, where predictability is the comprehension mechanism and where a 500 ms round trip is disqualifying. Position B describes sustained prose listening near conversational rate, where phonetic naturalness lowers the decode cost and half a second of startup is invisible. The blind NVDA user in kokoro#291 and the r/Blind trainer both sit on the "wants neural" side while remaining inside Position A's population; the constraint they name is latency and speed, not modernity. Nothing here establishes which regime a given dyslexic engineer falls into, and the corpus contradicts itself within the dyslexia population on first-hand reports alone. Open. [derived]

What is actually in dispute

Property	Position A claim	Position B claim	Status in this corpus
Key-press-to-speech latency	"instant" vs "100 MS or so" (HN 28654595); <200 ms stated as the requirement (kokoro#291)	not raised as a problem	Undisputed as a fact; disputed as a requirement
Run-to-run variation	breaks pattern-matching at 450–1200 wpm (HN 40234673)	not raised	Undisputed; only its cost differs by user
Word-level accuracy	modern models skip and garble (see part 2)	neural lowered error and rewind rate (HN 40238926)	Directly contradictory
Fatigue over hours	formant sustains a working day	formant caused fatigue; neural enabled hours (HN 40238926, r/Dyslexia p019irt)	Directly contradictory
Working speed	600–1200 wpm reported normal	no dyslexic user in this corpus reports above ~400 wpm	Asymmetric — the populations report different operating speeds
Voice quality as such	"night and day" in neural's favour, from a blind NVDA user (kokoro#291)	same direction	Not in dispute — the dispute is whether neural can be made fast enough

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2. Recurring failure classes — properties of the domain, not of one project

Four classes were named in the Hacker News pass. All four survive contact with the other five venues, two of them extended; two further classes appear that the HN pass did not name.

2.1 Neural word-skipping and garbling — confirmed, and extended past neural models

Reported against unrelated tools by unrelated people, all [community]: Pocket TTS silently dropped "it was the age of foolishness" from A Tale of Two Cities on an M1 Mac (HN 46641789) — to which Paul_S replied that every model he tried has the same problem and the only reliable check is to transcribe the output and diff it (HN 46644553). XTTSv2: "It will hallucinate nonsense words or insert extra syllables in words, pretty frequently" (HN 40648526). Coqui, from an EPUB-to-audiobook tool author: "lots of little hallucinations or dropped words … I stopped trusting it" (r/Blind). rhdunn, a non-screen-reader listener, reported it independently (HN 46732597); a commenter of 20 years' daily desktop TTS reported VibeVoice, Kokoro, sherpa-onnx, Piper and Orpheus all "output weird garble" at unpredictable times and stayed on Festival 1.96 (HN 45881648).

The extension the HN pass missed: the same symptom appears in OS-native and commercial stacks, not only in open neural models. Apple's Siri voices on iPadOS 16 "will randomly skip chunks of text if I'm using them for Speak Screen. On web pages it's apparently random, but in Kindle, for instance, the same chunks of text in books will be skipped", while non-Siri voices read everything (AppleVis — bot-walled, see the warning above); macOS narration on an epub "starts slurring, skipping words, trailing off … and then goes silent" (HN 44810558); Speechify for "unreliable narration, skipping paragraphs or pages" (r/audiobooks); NaturalReader "sometimes skips over blocks of text" (r/Dyslexia); ReadAny on Windows "frequently skips a paragraph at random", reproducibly at the same position (ReadAny#526, open, 2026-07-04). A structural cause is named: chunking under ~1000 characters to suppress hallucination "can't maintain consistent prosody without context" (HN 45882142) — the two defects trade against each other.

Read as: if you are choosing a reader for material where a dropped clause changes the meaning, this class is not avoidable by staying away from open neural models. It is reported against Apple's own Siri voices and against two commercial subscription products. [derived]

2.2 Advertised model size versus real install weight — confirmed

Against KittenTTS, marketed as a 25 MB model (KittenML/KittenTTS) [vendor]: "Its python venv has grown to 6 GBytes in size" (HN 44810237); and "I literally run out of disk trying to install this on Linux. On macOS … it's only ~700 MiB there", traced to torch pulling NVIDIA libraries (HN 47447632). The class generalises: SherpaTTS models on Android are "super heavy (the phone suspends other apps to disk while this runs)" (HN 44810523); Piper "use[s] up more ram and cpu and disk space to deliver a voice which doesn't sound much better than something like RH voice" (HN 40234739); VibeVoice's large model was reported to need a 24 GB card, with the requirement not stated before the install steps (YouTube).

2.3 The espeak-ng phonemizer choke point — confirmed, with the licence consequence now realised

One traced diagnosis carries the defect-propagation claim: a commenter ran Piper's own sample text through espeak-ng directly and found "it put the stresses in the same wrong places in certain words" (HN 42802049). Kokoro's paired-vowel errors — "Daisy becomes die-zee, leave becomes lay-ve" (HN 44252823) — drew the reply that the local phonemizer is the cause (HN 44255368). A blind NVDA user hit the same layer in a neural NVDA add-on: "the only problem with the addon is the phonemizer breaking stuff a lot" (r/LocalLLaMA). It is also an install choke point in four unrelated projects: Piper on Apple Silicon (YouTube), piper-phonemize unavailable to pip (YouTube), Mimic 3 on Windows (r/Python), and a Zonos one-click package shipping without espeak (YouTube).

The GPL question was raised independently against two projects: Kokoro's Apache-2.0 label — "it has eSpeak-NG as a dependency, which is GPL, which brings into question whether or not Kokoro is actually GPL", answered by another commenter that "If it depends on espeak NG code, the complete product is 100% GPL" (HN 46642602, HN 46646452) — and Kitten TTS (HN 44810063). These are commenters arguing; no licence-holder resolved it in this corpus, and this section takes no position on the legal question.

The Piper thread of this story closed during the collection window, and not the way the earlier draft said. In May 2024 the developer stated "the next version of Piper will no longer use espeak-ng to avoid potential GPL licensing issues" [vendor] (HN 40242782). What shipped instead is a separate repository, OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl, created 2025-03-28 and GPL-3.0 from its own first commit, whose README's first line says it "embeds espeak-ng for phonemization"; the MIT predecessor rhasspy/piper is archived, last pushed 2025-08-26, and unchanged (11,276 stars against the GPL line's 5,074) [measured, gh api 2026-08-09]. A 2026-04-02 community review describes the move as going "from MIT to GPL version 3" to respect the eSpeak NG licence [community] (Thorsten-Voice). So: the dependency was not dropped, and no single repository had its licence flipped — a new GPL-3.0 line was started beside a frozen MIT one. April 2026 is when a reviewer described the change, not when it happened.

2.4 Missing SSML — confirmed, and it is a correctness problem, not a polish problem

The worked example: without SSML, "Melania Trump's zip code is 20001" renders as "Melaynia Trump's zip code is twenty-thousand one", and respelling proper nouns to trick the engine "works until it doesn't" (HN 42802502); an ElevenLabs subscriber using Kokoro at scale reported the same want (HN 48825228). The mirror-image failure exists where dictionaries do exist: "Acapela likes to expand AST to Atlantic Standard Time, even when the context is so obviously (not) talking about time zones" (HN 46738810); Apple's Eloquence build mispronounces iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS with the Community Dictionary enabled (AppleVis — bot-walled, see the warning above); and downgrading edge-tts to restore audio "broke a lot of rules I was using to override Polish speech with SSML" (edge-tts#443, closed 2025-12-08).

2.5 New class — the Wayland selection and global-shortcut wall

Visible only in issue trackers and Linux subreddits, and decisive for any selection-reader on Wayland. Speech Note's owner: "This does not work 'by design'. Wayland does not allow access to clipboard data when the application is not active. This is a security feature, and there is nothing I can do to resolve this issue", with the reporter confirming the feature works under X11 (mkiol/dsnote#331). Precision note for anyone opening that issue: the thread is about speech-to-text writing its output to the clipboard, not a reader reading from it. The protocol restriction and the maintainer's sentence are general, but the surrounding discussion is an STT one. Crow Translate's maintainer closed the equivalent shortcut issue as expected behaviour: "Apps can't register global shortcuts themselves under Wayland, it's not supported by the protocol" (crow-translate#460). Odilia carries its own key handler "only because Wayland does not support the current standard for implementing AT key bindings" (odilia#78).

2.6 New class — PDF, mathematics and citation syntax defeat every reader in the corpus

"I have to read many academic papers and none can really handle the PDFs properly. Anytime there is any maths they just give up" (r/Dyslexia). A skip-parentheses setting cannot separate APA in-text citations from parenthetical prose because "In APA both are bound by () so just skipping text within () doesn't work" (r/Blind). A reading-app developer put raw OCR at "probably not better than 85%" before postprocessing (r/Dyslexia). All [community].

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3. Where community reports contradict project docs or vendor claims

Claim as published	Contradicting report	Both links
Kitten TTS presented as a 25 MB CPU-only model [vendor]	6 GB venv; out of disk on Linux; ~700 MiB on macOS [community]	repo · HN 44810237, HN 47447632
Piper README quickstart: pip install → download voice → run [vendor]	Errored on a missing module; web-server extra failed, Flask installed by hand [community]	piper1-gpl · Thorsten-Voice
pip install piper-tts, no platform-limitation notice [vendor]	Unsatisfiable onnxruntime on Python 3.14 and FreeBSD 14.3; maintainer confirmed [community]	issue 119 · issue 67
Piper developer, 2024-05: next version drops espeak-ng to avoid GPL [vendor]	espeak-ng still embedded; a new GPL-3.0 repository (piper1-gpl, created 2025-03-28) was started beside the archived MIT one [measured, gh api 2026-08-09], described in a 2026-04 review as moving "from MIT to GPL version 3" [community]	HN 40242782 · piper1-gpl · rhasspy/piper · review
Kokoro labelled Apache-2.0 [vendor]	Depends on GPL eSpeak NG; two commenters argue the combined product is GPL — unresolved by any licence-holder [community]	HN 46642602 · HN 46646452
Speechify advertising: photograph a book cover to get an audio version [vendor]	"It does not read you any book just by taking a picture of its cover. It has to be within its LIBRARY." [community]	r/Dyslexia
Speechify pricing presented as $7.99/month [vendor]	Charged $139 for a full year three days after signup; further reports of charges after cancellation [community]	r/audiobooks 2021 · 2025
Picovoice Orca suggested as an open alternative [community]	README quoted back: not open source, requires internet to validate an AccessKey [measured]	HN 44807147
Fish-Speech offered as a quality upgrade [community]	Weights licensed non-commercial only [measured]	HN 44812628
Read Aloud owner: hallucinated pauses are "Google's problems", text already segmented at ~750 chars [vendor]	Reporter's side-by-side against another extension's per-sentence splitting [community]	issue 427 · reporter's comment — the owner's half of this contradiction has no permalink of its own in the corpus; it is in the same thread [declared gap]
macOS Screen Sharing described as unusable with VoiceOver (VNC output) [community], 2022	AppleVis posters three years later report macOS 26 Screen Sharing does drive VoiceOver remotely [community]	AppleVis 2022 — bot-walled, see the warning above
Voice Dream Reader: existing purchasers to be moved to a subscription [vendor]	Reversed after community pushback; existing features kept at no extra cost [community]	r/Blind

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4. First-hand measurements, with hardware named where the reporter named it

Reporters' own figures, preserved as written. Single self-run benchmarks unless the corroboration column says otherwise; workloads differ, so these are not a controlled comparison.

Tool	Hardware named by the reporter	Figure as reported	Corrob.	Source
eSpeak (reference figure quoted by the reporter)	not stated — the figure is given bare	5–10 ms per short phrase	single	kokoro#291
Tiflotecnica (reference figure quoted by the reporter)	not stated	~50–150 ms	single	kokoro#291
Kokoro FP32 ONNX (CPU)	Core Ultra 7 258V, 32 GB RAM, Intel Arc 140V	~500 ms short phrase; INT8 ~1100 ms; OpenVINO GPU failed (dynamic STFT shapes)	single	kokoro#291
kokoro-onnx	3090 Ti / Ryzen 9950X	2364 MiB VRAM, 40 s for 980 s audio (~25× RT) / ~2 GB RAM, 86 s (~11× RT); PyTorch build 90× RT	single	r/LocalLLaMA
Kokoro-82M vs Supertonic-3 vs Inflect-Nano	Intel i5-8500T (6c/6t), CPU only	RTF/UTMOS: Supertonic-3 2-step 0.1245 / MOS 1.55; 5-step 0.2104 / 4.37; Kokoro PyTorch 0.3133 / 4.44; Kokoro ONNX 0.3433 / 4.44; Inflect-Nano 4.6M 0.0994 / 3.48	single	r/LocalLLaMA
Piper	Pixel 9, CPU only	>3× RTF, ~300 ms time-to-first-audio	single	r/LocalLLaMA
Piper	CPU-based server	~300–500 ms inference	multiple-indep.	r/LocalLLaMA
Supertonic 3	Pixel 9, CPU only	~2000 ms, → ~1000 ms with chunking	single	r/LocalLLaMA
Supertonic	CPU / RTX 4090	55× RT CPU, 175× RT on 4090, TTFA ~0.05 s	contested	HN 46733066
Kitten TTS	Intel i9-14900HX, Ubuntu 24	~315 ms initial latency; model load ~710 ms; 3.35×–5.50× RT	single	HN 44812882
Chatterbox	RTX 4060 mobile, 8 GB	~5.7 GB VRAM idle, ~6.5 GB peak; 16 s audio in 13 s	single	YouTube
Chatterbox	RTX 3090	~1× RT unquantized; ~2× RT after optimisation; 5 GB VRAM (server build)	multiple-indep.	r/LocalLLaMA
VibeVoice 7B	RTX 3090, headless Ubuntu, 4 concurrent batches	23.7 GB VRAM; 53.2 s audio in 14 s; 2–3.8× RT	single	r/LocalLLaMA
Orpheus (hosted)	vendor's own service	~200 ms streaming latency, ~$1/hr vs ElevenLabs / Play.ht $5+/hr	single [vendor]	HN 43646160
Google WaveNet via Read Aloud	cloud	"$16 per million character"	single	HN 23502150
Azure DragonHD via Keyboard Maestro	cloud, macOS	"$15 per 1M characters"	single	HN 48825485
Speechify vs NaturalReader quotas	n/a	~450k words/month at ~$139/yr vs ~500k chars/day at ~$110/yr	single	r/audiobooks

Correction to an earlier draft: the first two rows previously attributed the hardware string "average laptop CPU (i5/Ryzen 5, no GPU)" to the eSpeak and Tiflotecnica reference figures. Read at source, that string is the reporter's stated target hardware for a future implementation — "Target latency: <200ms on average laptop CPU (i5/Ryzen 5, no GPU)" — and the following line, "Reference: eSpeak achieves 5-10ms, Tiflotecnica ~50-150ms", carries no hardware at all [measured, issue body read 2026-08-09].

Read as: the latency column is where the two positions in part 1 separate numerically. The screen-reader requirement stated on the Kokoro issue is under 200 ms; the neural CPU figures in this table start around 300 ms and run to several seconds. Whether that gap has closed on hardware you own is not answerable from this corpus — none of these figures is a controlled comparison, and none was reproduced by me. [derived]

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5. Silence as a finding

[measured]: 653 catalogue entries were carried into the sentiment pass (sentiment-targets.txt, 653 non-empty lines, no header row — the first line is a real target); 164 canonical tools ended with at least one community record. 489 targets — about three quarters of the sweep — generated no record in any of the six venues. (Figures of "652 / ~488" appeared in an earlier draft; the file has 653 real lines.) Hacker News named 86 distinct labels, 18 of them domain-level ("TTS generally …"), leaving ~72 named products across every HN thread Algolia indexes for these terms.

Named-tool venue counts across the 1,016 records:

Tool	HN	YouTube	AT forums	Issue trackers	r/Blind-tier	r/LocalLLaMA-tier	Total
NVDA	18	18	32	14	34	2	118
Piper	21	30	1	9	7	25	93
Kokoro	20	20	0	2	2	36	80
Speechify	3	19	2	0	39	5	68
Eloquence	9	0	9	0	9	1	28
Kurzweil 3000	0	0	0	0	4	0	4
ClaroRead	0	1	0	0	1	0	2
Read&Write / Snap&Read	0	1	0	0	4	0	5
MWS Reader, Helperbird, ReadSpeaker TextAid, WordQ/SpeakQ, Ghotit, SprintPlus, Lingit, Zabaware, Panopreter, Copyfish	0	0	0	0	0	0	0 each

Further zero-record prominent entries [measured], from the CORE band with ≥400 stars or a live commercial listing: Translumo (5.6k stars), Bob/ripperhe (9.7k), PandaOCR.Pro (1.9k), VoivoClip (832), the Raycast TTS extensions, 天坦读屏/Tatans, 샤인플러스/Shine Plus, PC-Talker Neo, 센스리더/Sense Reader, Herald Pro, RightSpeak, Readwave, WordWand, Yaps, Penfriend, Alinea/Sensotec, Vovsoft Clipboard Reader, CastReader (castreader.ai, castreader.com), Speakoala, Fish Screen Reader.

Single-record tools are common even inside the venues: ClaroRead, Bookshare, Capti, Adobe Acrobat Read Aloud, Syllavox, the iOS 26 Accessibility Reader and the Windows audio-fade report each rest on one record (sentiment-collated.json), and Capti's is second-hand.

What silence does imply: these tools were not discussed in the venues read, across those venues' full indexed history. Where a whole class is silent — the commercial dyslexia-assistive tier, the Japanese, Korean and Chinese screen readers, the Raycast extensions — that is a property of where their users talk. The AppleVis Dolphin thread shows the mechanism from inside: "Does anyone actually use it? I never hear anyone talking about it - it's always NVDA and Jaws" (AppleVis — bot-walled, see the warning above) — in a thread whose starter reports Dolphin was the only Windows screen reader his local blindness association knew of.

What silence does not imply: low quality, small install base or abandonment. Parts of the commercial dyslexia tier are sold through institutions and national funding schemes, which routes their users through an assessor rather than a forum. Two of those routes are readable on the vendors' own pages: Everway publishes a "ClaroRead for DSA" page under a "govt grant schemes / What is the DSA?" path for the UK Disabled Students' Allowance (everway.com), and Lingit states that "Lingdys Pluss kan søkes om hos NAV Hjelpemiddelsentral" — it is applied for through the Norwegian NAV assistive-technology centre — alongside a school edition, "Lingdys Skole" (lingit.no). Both [measured, pages read 2026-08-09]. An earlier draft also asserted Dutch and Flemish school licensing for this tier; I could not confirm that from the Sensotec/Jabbla pages in the time available, and it is withdrawn to [lead]. Silence measures the discourse, not the software.

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6. Where "the community says" is one loud commenter

The corpus is not 1,016 independent voices. [measured] by corroboration field: 625 records single-comment, 246 multiple-independent, 114 contested, 31 thread-consensus. Named-commenter frequency in claim text: miki123211 in 12 records, Justin Harris 6, jareds 5, ClawsOnPaws 4, devinprater 4, nowittyusername 3.

Read as: 62% of the corpus is one person saying something once, and the four names above account for a visible share of the sharpest formulations in part 1. Treat any single-record claim below as a lead, not a finding. [derived]

Concentrated rather than corroborated:

• The formant-latency case on HN rests substantially on two accounts, ClawsOnPaws and miki123211, across four threads spanning 2021–2026 (28654595, 40234673, 46737597, 28654291). It is independently supported by tapper (44809136), mwcampbell (28652095), the r/Blind trainer and the r/LocalLLaMA blind NVDA user — the class holds, but its sharpest formulations trace to two people.
• One specific mechanism rests on one comment — the broader position does not. The pairing "dyslexia plus auditory processing disorder → neural lowers my error and fatigue, classical does not" is stated first-hand exactly once in 1,016 records: barfbagginus, HN 40238926. Only 3 records in the whole corpus mention auditory processing at all, and only that one states the pairing. Weight the mechanism as one report. The broader position it belongs to — a dyslexic reader favouring modern voices — has at least three first-hand records: barfbagginus; the r/Dyslexia 30-minute-headache report (p019irt); and the dyslexic r/audiobooks commenter on Speechify's voices being "comfortable to listen too for a long period of time" (l66n53w). Set against two first-hand r/Dyslexia reports that SAPI-era classical tools work reliably, and against a blind NVDA user who wants neural and is blocked only by latency (kokoro#291). [measured, corpus search]
• Five YouTube speed measurements come from one video by Jarod (Jarods Journey) covering Kokoro, Zonos, GPT-SoVITS, StyleTTS 2 and Coqui in one sitting (source) — one machine, one methodology, five rows. nowittyusername's "over ten TTS systems in 25 days" supplies several high-throughput figures (HN 46733066) and is flagged contested against the screen-reader article in the same thread.
• Three AppleVis remote-access records are Justin Harris in one thread; four Dolphin records are one July 2024 thread (AppleVis — bot-walled, see the warning above).
• Syllavox's only record is its own author describing the design, not third-party use (r/AssistiveTechnology) — as is a Kitten TTS quality claim from a maintainer about an unreleased model (r/LocalLLaMA). One Speechify endorsement is disclosed sponsored content: "we were provided a free license to use Speechify in exchange for an honest review" (The Dyslexia Journey).

Independently reported by unrelated people in unrelated venues, and weightable accordingly: neural word-skipping (six venues), espeak-ng phonemizer defects (four venues), Piper install friction (61 records across 13 venues per sentiment-collated.json), Speechify billing complaints (multiple threads, multiple years).

Stance distribution across the 164 collated tools [measured]: broken-for-me 35, comparison 30, other 27, works-for-me 20, install-friction 17, quality-complaint 13, accessibility-specific 12, licensing-or-cost 6, maintenance-concern 3, quality-praise 1. Note that comparison (30) and other (27) each outrank works-for-me, so the friction skew is narrower than the trouble-report categories alone suggest. A corpus assembled by searching for discussion of tools surfaces trouble reports more readily than satisfaction; that ratio is a property of the collection method as much as of the software.

---

7. Venue coverage honesty

[measured] What was read, and how much weight it carries:

Venue family	Records	Distinct tool labels	Coverage note
Hacker News	168	86 (18 domain-level)	Searched via the Algolia API; whole threads read rather than sampled. Skews to engineers, open models and Linux; the commercial assistive tier is absent.
YouTube	189	41	41 labels is the fewest of the six families. Comments plus auto-captions, whose errors are visible in the corpus ("Piper phiz", "each speak dng"), so transcript quotes carry transcription risk. One review is disclosed as sponsored.
AT forums + mailing lists	128	102	AppleVis supplies 77 records (75 distinct URLs), 60% of this family — and AppleVis is bot-walled to any scripted fetch, so all 77 were verifiable only against the on-disk corpus. The remaining 51 spread over 14 venues, 12 of them at 1–7 records each, with GNOME Discourse the one outlier at 12: GNOME Discourse 12, AccessIndia 7, orca-list 5, VIPhone 4, BRLTTY 4, MacVisionaries 3, blind-computing 3, PC Audio 3, debian-accessibility 2, Window-Eyes 2, blindandroidusers 2, Blinux 2, Talks-users 1, Audyssey 1 — thin, and read through mail-archive mirrors of unverified completeness.
GitHub issue trackers	104	32 repos	Only 32 of 653 targets had their tracker read. Absence of an issue here is not absence of issues.
r/Blind-tier subreddits	208	84	r/Blind 73, r/audiobooks 42, r/AssistiveTechnology 32, r/Dyslexia 29, r/accessibility 29, r/tts 3 — sums to 208 exactly. At 29 records, r/Dyslexia is the smallest input for the population this document is written for.
r/LocalLLaMA-tier subreddits	219	168	r/LocalLLaMA 69, r/macapps 36, r/selfhosted 22, r/software 11, r/AutoHotkey 10, remainder across ~20 subs at 1–9 each. Skews to GPU inference and model quality, not selection-reading ergonomics.

Correction to an earlier draft: the r/Blind-tier row previously listed r/macapps 36 inside it, making its own numbers sum to 241 against a stated 208. r/macapps is in the tech-tier file, where it holds 36 records, second only to r/LocalLLaMA's 69 — which also contradicted that row's note of "1–11 each" for the remainder. Both rows above are recounted from source_url per file [measured, own count 2026-08-09].

Two bookkeeping facts. sentiment-reddit-accessibility.json (174 rows) is a strict subset of sentiment-reddit-accessibility-full.json (208 rows), with 0 URLs unique to the subset; only the latter is counted, giving 1,016 records across six files, 986 unique source URLs. Counts quoted elsewhere as "~1,300" include the superseded subset.

Sources a reader cannot re-open by clicking [measured, fetch attempts 2026-08-09]: applevis.com (four cited pages, Cloudflare 403 "Just a moment…"), alternativeto.net, sourceforge.net directory pages, and support.freedomscientific.com (live page returns a near-empty body; its content was confirmed instead through the Wayback capture of 2026-07-07). These resolve in an ordinary interactive browser; they do not resolve to a script. Where a claim rests only on such a page, it was verified against the on-disk corpus, which holds the verbatim quote and date — that is a weaker guarantee than an open link, and it is stated here rather than hidden.

Venues not read at all [measured, by absence]: the NVDA users list on groups.io — the venue an HN commenter told the Kitten TTS authors to post to (HN 44809136); Chrome Web Store, App Store and Play Store reviews (four AppleVis app-directory rows aside); Discord and Telegram, where Jieshuo is distributed and updated "3 to 4 times in a week" (AccessIndia); vendor support communities for the commercial dyslexia tier; any non-English forum outside the mailing-list mirrors.

---

8. What this section could not establish

Stated plainly, so nothing above reads as more settled than it is.

1. Which regime a given dyslexic reader falls into. The corpus splits within the dyslexia population on first-hand reports alone, and no record in it is a controlled comparison. This is the question the section was written to address, and the one the corpus cannot answer.
2. Whether the sub-200 ms neural target has been met on ordinary hardware. The only measured figures here are one blind user's, on one machine, on one model, in December 2025. Nothing was benchmarked by me.
3. Whether espeak-ng's GPL reaches Kokoro or KittenTTS as distributed. A legal question about linkage and distribution, argued by commenters, unresolved by any licence-holder in this corpus. No verdict is available and none is implied.
4. Anything about the 489 zero-record targets. Silence measures the venues read, not the software.
5. The AppleVis, AlternativeTo, SourceForge and Freedom Scientific pages as live sources. Bot-walled; one closed through Wayback, the rest resting on the on-disk corpus.
6. Dutch and Flemish institutional licensing of the commercial dyslexia tier — asserted in an earlier draft, not confirmed from a vendor page, now [lead].
7. Nothing here was executed. No tool was installed, no latency measured, no voice heard. Every figure is somebody else's, quoted and linked.

04-voice-and-model-supply.md

Model and voice supply — where the voice actually comes from

This section covers only L4: the voice itself. A reader that owns acquisition and trigger still has to get audio from somewhere, and the five supply routes below fail in five different ways. [measured] = read from the named file, API or page; [vendor] = an unchecked supplier claim; [community] = a user report; [lead] = found but unverified; [derived] = my inference from the facts named beside it. Where a number and an opinion share a paragraph, the opinion is under "Read as:" — delete it and the number still stands.

Prices, licences and repository facts in this section were re-read at source on 2026-08-09. Where a figure sits somewhere on a vendor page that a scripted fetch of the visible pricing card does not reach — Rime's FAQ, OpenAI's server-rendered table — the location is named beside it, so the figure is reproducible rather than merely asserted.

---

1. Local neural models

1.1 Where the weights live and what they weigh

Model	Weights from	On-disk	Runtime	Licence
Piper (piper1-gpl)	HF rhasspy/piper-voices; one .onnx + one .onnx.json per voice, low/medium/high tiers (VOICES.md)	en_US-lessac-medium.onnx = 63,201,294 bytes + a 4,885-byte config [measured, HF API]	onnxruntime — voices "trained with VITS and exported to the onnxruntime"	GPL-3.0; repository created 2025-03-28, and its COPYING file (GNU GPL version 3) was added in the initial commit, timestamped 2025-03-28T21:16:06Z [measured, gh api commits?path=COPYING]
Piper (rhasspy/piper)	same voice repo	same	onnxruntime	MIT — archived read-only, created 2023-01-10, last pushed 2025-08-26, 11,276 stars against the maintained repository's 5,074 [measured, gh api 2026-08-09]
Kokoro (hexgrad/kokoro)	HF hexgrad/Kokoro-82M; G2P via misaki	kokoro-v1_0.pth = 327,212,226 bytes [measured, HF API]	PyTorch	Apache-2.0 [measured, gh api] — see 1.3
kokoro-onnx	HF	"~300MB, quantized ~80MB" [vendor, README]	onnxruntime	MIT
KittenTTS	HF, four variants	nano-int8 = 24,369,971-byte ONNX + 3,278,902-byte voices.npz = 27,648,873 bytes (27.6 MB) [measured, HF API]; mini 80 MB, micro 41 MB [vendor, README]	onnxruntime	Apache-2.0 [measured, gh api]
Supertonic	HF Supertone/supertonic, OnnxSlim-optimised; fixed voices, no official cloning	"~260MB by sum of the relevant ONNX files", Docker wrapper "in about 500 MB" [community, YouTube]	onnxruntime, via Core ML on Apple Silicon	MIT
Chatterbox	HF ResembleAI/chatterbox	repo tree sums to 13.9 GB across format variants; one config ≈ t3_cfg 1,064.9 MB + s3gen 1,057.2 MB + ve 5.7 MB [measured, HF API]	PyTorch	MIT
StyleTTS 2	HF checkpoints	not captured	PyTorch + a phonemizer calling espeak-ng	MIT
F5-TTS	HF, "~1.2GB class"	not re-measured (HF API returned no file list)	PyTorch	MIT code; per-checkpoint terms differ
GPT-SoVITS	HF / ModelScope + user-trained	not captured	PyTorch	MIT
IndexTTS	HF / ModelScope	not captured	PyTorch	NOASSERTION (custom)
Orpheus-TTS	HF; 3B, with 1b/400m/150m on the roadmap	not captured	PyTorch; 3B is GPU-shaped	Apache-2.0
Zonos	HF	not captured	PyTorch	Apache-2.0
Fish-Speech / OpenAudio	HF	not captured	PyTorch	NOASSERTION — LICENSE and README restrict commercial use
Coqui TTS / XTTS	own model zoo + HF; tts --list_models enumerates	not captured	PyTorch	MPL-2.0; Coqui the company shut down, idiap/coqui-ai-TTS is the maintained fork
NeuTTS, OuteTTS	HF	not captured	GGUF Q4/Q8; NeuTTS streaming is GGUF-only	see repos
Kokoro via MLX / Core ML	mlx-community or prince-canuma/Kokoro-82M	see the note below	MLX or Core ML, Apple Silicon	Apache-2.0 upstream

One model, seven download sizes: consumer apps shipping the same 82M-parameter Kokoro report ~80 MB (Myna), ~99 MB (SuperUtter), ~300 MB (Subvocal), ~330 MB (aloud-tts), ~350 MB (quoth), ~360 MB (MLXRead) and ~400 MB bundled (Orator) [vendor, each project's README].

Read as: a factor of five across one model, because quantisation and format are not stated in the headline number. A download size on a project page describes that project's packaging, not the model.

1.2 On-disk size is not install weight

One catalogue instance is documented from both ends. KittenTTS's README states "Model sizes from 25 MB (int8) to 80 MB" [vendor, README]; its int8 files measure 27,648,873 bytes — 27.6 MB — from the model host's own file listing [measured, HF API].

Against that, two independent first-hand measurements of the installed footprint, each cited at the sentence that reports it:

• A reporter measured the resulting Python environment at 6 GB — "Its python venv has grown to 6 GBytes in size. The demo sentence works, it takes 3s to render the audio. Audio sounds like a voice in a tin can." — bashkiddie, 2025-08-06 [community, HN 44810237].
• A second reporter measured the dependency install at 7.1 GB — "I ran install instructions and it took 7.1GB of deps, tf you mean "tiny" ?" — PunchyHamster, 2026-03-19 [community, HN 47447368]. The maintainer replied in two minutes: "damnn, lemme fix it, sorry for that. we may have forgotten to remove the redundant dependencies" [vendor, same thread]. A third commenter's diagnosis of the cause: "It's mostly torch" [community, HN 47447632].

The dependency chain is visible in a pip transcript pasted into the same thread: num2words, spacy, espeakng_loader, misaki>=0.9.4 [community, HN 47447994]. The collation (21 KittenTTS records across 4 venues) also records a Linux reporter running out of disk because torch pulls NVIDIA CUDA libraries — against roughly 700 MiB on macOS and about 3 GiB on Linux after pinning the CPU-only torch index [community, sentiment-collated.json, KittenTTS row].

Read as: an ONNX model is small; a Python ML environment is not. The two reports divide out to 217x and 257x the 27.6 MB of model files [derived: 6 GB and 7.1 GB over 27,648,873 bytes]. The ONNX-runtime projects (Piper, kokoro-onnx, Supertonic, sherpa-onnx) avoid torch entirely; the PyTorch ones do not. That is the variable, not the parameter count.

For scale in the other direction, a blind NVDA user's reaction to the KittenTTS launch was a size comparison against the synthesiser he already uses: "I am blind and use NVDA with a sinth. How is this news? I don't get it! My sinth is called eloquence and is 4089KB" — tapper, 2025-08-06 [community, HN 44809042]. That is 4,089 KB against 27.6 MB of model files, before any runtime is counted.

1.3 The espeak-ng dependency, and the open licence question under it

eSpeak NG's README states that it "is released under the GPL version 3 or later license" — so GPL-3.0-or-later, not bare GPL-3.0 [measured, README]. It is not merely a fallback voice — it is the grapheme-to-phoneme front end under several models that are themselves published under permissive licences:

• Piper: the current README's first line is "A fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization" [measured, README].
• Kokoro: "Kokoro only uses Espeak for text-to-phoneme (AKA G2P) conversion" [community, HN 46643265].
• KittenTTS: espeakng_loader appears as a direct dependency in the install transcript above.
• StyleTTS 2: the catalogue row records "needs phonemizer/espeak-ng".

What is settled, and what is not. The licence of each repository is a fact and was read from the registry: espeak-ng GPL-3.0-or-later · Kokoro Apache-2.0 · KittenTTS Apache-2.0 · OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl GPL-3.0 · rhasspy/piper MIT (archived) [measured, gh api 2026-08-09]. Whether espeak-ng's GPL reaches any of the permissively-licensed models as they are distributed is not settled, and I am not able to settle it. That is a legal question about linkage and distribution — how the phonemizer is invoked, what is shipped in the same artefact, and what counts as a derivative work — and no repository, licence file or registry field answers it. It is recorded here as an open legal question, not as a technical fact, and nothing below should be read as a determination either way.

The question was raised repeatedly in public and never answered by a licence-holder. jhatemyjob, on Kokoro: "Kokoro says its Apache licensed. But it has eSpeak-NG as a dependency, which is GPL, which brings into question whether or not Kokoro is actually GPL… Dealing with potential GPL contamination is a nightmare." [community, HN 46642602, 2026-01-16]. jcelerier replied: "If it depends on espeak NG code, the complete product is 100% GPL… if you are able to change the code to take off the espeak dependency then the rest would revert to non-GPL" [community, HN 46646452]. The identical objection was raised about KittenTTS by woadwarrior01 five months earlier: "the project isn't at the liberty to grant such an exception because it inherits its GPL license from espeak-ng" [community, HN 44810063, 2025-08-06]. All three are commenters stating positions; none is the licence-holder, and no licence-holder responded in any thread collected.

What Piper's maintainer said, and what actually shipped — with the dates kept apart. On 2024-05-03, synesthesiam (Piper's author) posted: "As the sibling comment mentions, the next version of Piper will no longer use espeak-ng to avoid potential GPL licensing issues." [measured, HN 40242782, retrieved via the HN API].

That is not what shipped. Three dates, deliberately separated, because they are commonly run together:

Date	What happened	Evidence
2024-05-03	The maintainer states the intent to drop espeak-ng	[measured, HN 40242782]
2025-03-28	OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl is created, with the GNU GPL v3 COPYING file present in its initial commit (21:16:06Z), repository created 21:47:10Z	[measured, gh api: repo + commits?path=COPYING]
2026-04-02	A community video describes the licensing situation as a move "from MIT to GPL version 3"	[community, Thorsten-Voice]

April 2026 is the publication date of that video, not the date of any relicensing. No repository changed its licence under anyone. What exists is two repositories: rhasspy/piper, still MIT and archived read-only since 2025-08-26; and OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl, a separate repository that has carried the GPL text since its own first commit and whose README says it embeds espeak-ng [measured, gh api 2026-08-09]. An open issue from 2026-07-21 asks that "piper should build w/ given espeak-ng" [measured, issue #243].

Read as: the stated intent was to drop espeak-ng and keep a permissive licence; what shipped instead was a new, separately-named repository carrying both espeak-ng and the GPL, alongside a frozen permissive predecessor. Anyone who checks "Piper's licence" against the archived repository — which carries 11,276 stars to the maintained repository's 5,074 [measured, gh api] — reads MIT and reaches the opposite conclusion from the maintained line. For a single user reading his own screen, the whole question is legally inert; it engages only on redistribution.

---

2. OS-native voices

Cost: zero, on every platform below. No account, no key, no network for the offline voices.

Platform	API / entry point	How extra voices arrive	Stated limit
macOS	/usr/bin/say; AVSpeechSynthesizer (docs); Spoken Content in Accessibility settings	Enhanced/Premium voices download on demand into /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_VoiceServices_CombinedVocalizerVoices; Personal Voice into ..._CustomVoice [measured]	Personal Voice needs requestPersonalVoiceAuthorization and macOS 14+, and is reported not to appear in say -v '?' — the CLI and the framework do not expose the same voice set [measured; flagged as worth confirming]. say --help is not a recognised option; only man say documents it
Windows	SAPI 5 (System.Speech.Synthesis / ISpVoice); OneCore (Windows.Media.SpeechSynthesis); Narrator natural voices	SAPI 5 voices register under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens; OneCore under ...\Speech_OneCore\Voices\Tokens; natural voices arrive as per-language MSIX packs from Narrator settings > Add natural voices [measured]	Three separate speech systems coexist. A voice visible in Settings is not necessarily visible to a SAPI 5 application [measured]. The natural voices are not sanctioned for third-party use — see below
Android	android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech (docs)	pluggable engines (Speech Services by Google, Samsung TTS, third-party such as SherpaTTS); voice data downloads per language	ERROR_NETWORK, ERROR_NETWORK_TIMEOUT and ERROR_NOT_INSTALLED_YET exist in the API precisely because some voices are network-backed and some downloads unfinished [measured]
Linux	espeak-ng; RHVoice; Festival; Mimic 1/3 — normally reached through speech-dispatcher	espeak-ng ships rule-based formant voices with no downloaded weights; RHVoice ships small-footprint HTS statistical voices [measured]	Licences differ from the neural set: espeak-ng GPL-3.0-or-later, RHVoice GPL with voices under their own terms, Mimic 3 AGPL-3.0, Festival BSD-like

The Windows 11 natural-voice restriction, stated by the person who reverse-engineered it. The NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter README: "This engine uses some encryption keys extracted from system files to use the voices, so it's more like a hack than a proper solution" and "Microsoft hasn't yet allowed third-party apps to use the Narrator/Edge voices, and this can stop working at any time, for example, after a system update" [measured, README]. The same README now advises against installing the latest Narrator voices because they stopped working with the adapter.

Read as: what separates the OS voices from the local neural models in section 1 is not the absence of a bill or a key — Piper, kokoro-onnx, Supertonic and sherpa-onnx also run with no bill, no key and no third party in the request path once installed. What the OS voices additionally avoid is the model supply chain itself: nothing is downloaded from a model hub, no weights file is version-managed, and there is no upstream repository whose licence or availability can change. The constraint that comes with that is reach, not quality — you get the voices the vendor ships, no cloning, no timing data beyond what the API exposes, and on Windows the neural voices are fenced off from anything that is not Narrator or Edge.

---

3. Cloud APIs

Provider	Rate per 1M characters	Free tier	Account
Azure AI Speech	Neural $15.00; Neural HD $22.00; legacy standard $4.00; Personal Voice $24.00; Long Audio $100 [measured, Azure Retail Prices API, eastus, 2026-08-08]	F0: 0.5M chars/month, recurring, not a trial. Hard cap of 20 transactions per 60 seconds, and the quota doc states "This limit isn't adjustable" [measured]	Azure subscription + Speech resource key
Google Cloud TTS	Standard/WaveNet $4; Neural2/Polyglot $16; Chirp 3 HD $30; Studio $160 [measured, pricing]	4M chars/month Standard+WaveNet, 1M Neural2/Studio/Chirp — recurring	GCP project with billing enabled
Amazon Polly	Standard $4.00; Neural $16.00; Generative $30.00; Long-Form $100.00 [measured, pricing]	Standard 5M/month; Neural 1M/month for 12 months only	AWS account + IAM
OpenAI	gpt-4o-mini-tts $0.60 per 1M input text tokens + $12.00 per 1M audio output tokens, 2,000-token input cap per request [measured, guide]; tts-1 "$15.00 / 1M characters" and tts-1-hd "$30.00 / 1M characters" [measured, pricing — see the reproduction note below]	none	API key + prepaid credits
ElevenLabs	credit plans: Free 10k/mo; Starter $6 = 30k; Creator $22 = 121k; Pro $99 = 600k; Scale $299 = 1.8M; Business $990 = 6M [measured, pricing]	10,000 credits/month (~10 min), no rollover	API key
Deepgram	Aura-2 $30; Aura-1 $15 [measured, pricing]	$200 signup credit, no card, no expiry — one-time, ~6.6M chars at Aura-2 rates	API key
Cartesia	credit plans: Pro $5/mo ≈ 133 min; Startup $49 ≈ 1,667 min; Scale $299 ≈ 10,667 min [measured, pricing]	~27 min/month, 2 concurrent requests, no commercial-use licence	API key
Rime	Mist $30 ($0.03 per 1K chars); Coda $50 ($0.05 per 1K chars) [measured, pricing — see the reproduction note below]	the page states "~800 minutes free (about 800k characters)" on the Starter card and "Every new account starts with 3,000 free minutes on the Starter plan" in its FAQ — it contradicts itself on one page [measured, both strings read 2026-08-09]	API key
PlayHT / PlayAI	—	—	Withdrawn. Groq's deprecations page records: "on December 23, 2025, we emailed users to announce the deprecation of playai-tts and playai-tts-arabic in favor of the newer Orpheus text-to-speech models from Canopy Labs", with a 12/31/25 shutdown date and canopylabs/orpheus-v1-english as the replacement model ID [measured, console.groq.com/docs/deprecations]. On 2026-08-09 play.ht has MX records but no A record, and www.play.ai resolves but does not complete a TLS connection within 25 s [measured, host + curl]

Reproduction note for two of those rates. Both figures below sit on the vendor's own page, but not in the visible pricing card a quick fetch lands on, so they are recorded with their location. Rime's per-model split is in the FAQ, under "How is Rime priced?": "Starter begins at $0.03 per 1,000 characters (about a minute of audio): $0.03 for Mist and $0.05 for Coda." OpenAI's legacy rates are in the server-rendered payload of the pricing table at developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing (platform.openai.com/docs/pricing 301-redirects there), as {"model":"tts-1", … "$15.00 / 1M characters"} and {"model":"tts-1-hd", … "$30.00 / 1M characters"}; the visible table is hydrated client-side. Both were read on 2026-08-09.

Three consequences stated plainly, not as advice:

1. Cloud TTS means the text you are reading is transmitted to a third party. Whatever is on screen — a private message, a medical letter, an unreleased contract, a password-reset email — leaves your machine as the request body. That is a property of the architecture, not a policy failing.
2. Some published rates carry a training opt-in. Deepgram's listed pay-as-you-go rates opt in to its Model Improvement Program [measured]. Google's free-tier terms historically permit free-tier data to be used to improve products [lead — verify on your own account].
3. A supplier can end. PlayHT's models were deprecated off Groq on 2025-12-31 (row above); Coqui the company is gone; Nuance's enterprise Vocalizer is in an announced end-of-life window (dates published by a competitor, Picovoice; no Microsoft or Nuance primary source located — treat as unverified).

On re-reading the same text twice. Amazon Polly's pricing page addresses this directly: "In addition, you can cache and replay Amazon Polly's generated speech at no additional cost" [measured, pricing]. That is the only page among the providers in this table where I found the question addressed at all. I did not read the other providers' terms of service on this point, so this is not a finding that they forbid caching, or that they are silent on it — only that I looked at the pricing pages and did not find the question answered there [declared gap]. If re-reading a paragraph you have already synthesised matters to your cost model, the governing document is each provider's terms of service, and it needs reading per provider.

Two vendor terms that bite specific readers: OpenAI's guide states "Our usage policies require you to provide a clear disclosure to end users that the TTS voice they are hearing is AI-generated" [measured]; ElevenLabs states its free plan "is intended for personal, non-commercial use and requires attribution to ElevenLabs" [measured].

---

4. The unofficial Edge endpoint

rany2/edge-tts and its wrappers speak to an undocumented Microsoft WebSocket behind Edge's Read Aloud. No account, no key, no charge — which is why dozens of catalogue entries use it as their default backend. No public terms grant exists for third-party use of that endpoint.

Its breakage history, from the upstream tracker [measured, issue dates via gh api 2026-08-09]:

Date	What happened	Issues
2024-10-18 → 10-31	Mass 403 wave. Microsoft began requiring a Sec-MS-GEC token; #290 is titled "403 error is back/need to implement Sec-MS-GEC token" and its traceback shows a WSServerHandshakeError 403 against wss://speech.platform.bing.com/consumer/speech/synthesize/readaloud/edge/v1	#264, #265, #266, #267, #270, #274, #275, #276, then #286, #287, #290, #293, #295
2024-10-21	Mainland-China IPs blocked	#277, #286
2025-08-17 → 08-28	Endpoint migration. A user's mitmproxy capture of live Edge showed Read Aloud had moved to https://api.msedgeservices.com/tts/cognitiveservices/websocket/v1, with Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key and Sec-MS-GEC replacing TrustedClientToken. Releases 7.2.1–7.2.3 shipped 2025-08-20..28; #416 reports the new endpoint still had problems	#399, #401, #416
2025-12-08 → 12-12	Another break; #442 and #443 both opened 2025-12-08, #444 on 12-10, #447 on 12-12, and releases 7.2.4–7.2.7 shipped inside that window	#442, #443, #444 ("Was the request method for v7.2.3 disabled by Microsoft?"), #447
2026-01-20 → 2026-07-20	#458 WSServerHandshakeError: 403; #463 (2026-03-05) preceding release 7.2.8 (2026-03-22); #473 "Intermittent No audio was received errors with valid requests" and #481 both still open	#458, #463, #473, #481

Tracker: github.com/rany2/edge-tts/issues. Custom SSML support was removed from the library outright because "Microsoft prevents the use of any SSML that could not be generated by Microsoft Edge itself" [measured].

Read as: four protocol-level breaks in under two years, each fixed only after users reported it, plus intermittent silent failures still open. Every wrapper inherits this — openai-edge-tts, MsEdgeTTS, hass-edge-tts, node-edge-tts, and the Cloudflare Worker relays, whose existence is itself evidence of the region blocking in #277 and #286 and which add a further third party to the path.

---

5. The commercial assistive-technology voice market

Supplier	Install route	Cost	Consumed by
Cerence Embedded TTS (cerence.com)	not sold direct; reached only through a licensed packager	OEM, per-integrator	Tiflotecnia, Runa TTS, Voxin, NextUp
Tiflotecnia Voices for NVDA 4.0 (tiflotecnia.com)	NVDA add-on (free in the Add-on Store, publisher ruifontes); the licence key is the paid part	AUD $160.00 [measured, NV Access listing]; discounted upgrade from a Vocalizer or Code Factory licence	NVDA
Acapela TTS Voices for NVDA (acapela-nvda.com)	NVDA add-on; two builds offered, "NVDA 2019.3 +" and "NVDA 2026.x +"	AUD $95.00, one licence covering all languages, installable on up to 3 personal computers of the same user [measured]	NVDA
CereProc / CereVoice (app.cereproc.com)	SAPI 5, plus SDK and cloud credits	per-device licence; commercial use is an annual fee [vendor]. Acquired by Capacity 10 July 2024; cereproc.com now 301-redirects to capacity.com [measured, 2026-08-09]	any SAPI 5 consumer
Freedom Scientific synthesiser downloads	gated by host-product version	bundled with the JAWS/ZoomText/Fusion licence	JAWS, MAGic, Fusion
Code Factory Eloquence / Voices for NVDA	SAPI 5 synthesiser and an NVDA add-on	~USD 69 through resellers [lead, AFB article]	NVDA, and any SAPI 5 consumer
ETI-Eloquence / IBM ViaVoice Outloud	32-bit DLL, obtained separately	proprietary, licensed	NVDA add-ons, JAWS
DECtalk / FonixTalk (dectalk.nu)	community archive distributing SAPI 5 and NVDA builds plus hardware-synth drivers	none charged; "community redistribution of legacy builds is unlicensed in practice"	SAPI 5, NVDA

Freedom Scientific's version fence, which matters if you inherit a licence. Its download page states that Vocalizer Expressive v1 voices work with JAWS 15–17 and MAGic 13.1, v2 with Fusion 11 / JAWS 18 / ZoomText 2018 / MAGic 14 or later — then: "When you install a version 2 voice, any version 1 voices installed on your computer are no longer available… To restore the version 1 voices, you must first uninstall all version 2 voices." [measured, support.freedomscientific.com/Downloads/synthesizers — the live page returns a near-empty body to a scripted fetch; the text above was confirmed in the Wayback capture of 2026-07-07 17:58:12 UTC]

5.1 Code Factory's discontinuation — confirmed and dated

Code Factory's own product page at codefactoryglobal.com/usecases/apps/voices-for-nvda is headed "Not available anymore" and reads: "Due to compatibility issues with the latest version of NVDA that has recently been released, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue our current range of product voices… maintaining compatibility with the newest updates has presented significant challenges that prevent us from continuing to offer this product as a viable solution… More information coming soon." [measured, fetched live 2026-08-09]

Dating: the page's own metadata date is 2024-04-17; the earliest Wayback capture, 2024-05-11 12:53:42 UTC, already contains the identical notice, so the announcement is on or before 2024-05-11. The text is unchanged in every capture through 2026-05-17 and in the live fetch — "More information coming soon" has stood for over two years with no replacement product [measured]. The user-side account, from NV Access's In-Process of 4 August 2025: "When Code Factory suddenly dropped support for their Eloquence add-on without warning, many users were left disappointed."

Acapela is the counter-case in the same market: it ships a build tracking NVDA 2026.x [measured, its download page]. Tiflotecnia positions its Cerence product as the upgrade path for stranded Code Factory licence holders [vendor].

5.2 ETI-Eloquence: what I could and could not establish

Eloquence is the synthesiser blind power-users name repeatedly in this catalogue's community data, and the reason they give is latency, not naturalness. Its footprint was cited by a blind NVDA user as 4,089 KB against KittenTTS's advertised 25 MB [community, HN 44809042].

What is measured:

• The engine binary is 32-bit only. The maintained NVDA add-on states: "The Eloquence DLL is 32-bit only. This add-on launches the Eloquence Host Process (eloquence_host32.exe) to load the Eloquence Engine and stream audio back to 64-bit NVDA." [measured, fastfinge/eloquence_64 README]
• That add-on carries no licence (gh api returns license: null), created 2025-10-13, last pushed 2026-07-25, 29 stars [measured, gh api]. The engine inside it is not the add-on author's to license.
• Its Android build was dropped over 64-bit incompatibility and returned in 2025; NVDA users are told plainly that "IBM viavoice outloud tts is not supported because it is an old sapi4 synthesizer" [measured].
• The one lawful retail channel found is Code Factory (SAPI 5 / NVDA add-on) plus Tiflotecnia reselling it — and Code Factory's NVDA product is the discontinued one above.

Declared gap — the "last compiled around 2003" claim. I could not confirm a build date from IBM, SpeechFX, Nuance or Code Factory; a targeted search returned NVDA add-on listings and forum threads only. The closest first-hand evidence in the corpus is a screen-reader developer's account, not a vendor record: mwcampbell, who was tasked with adding Eloquence support to a Windows screen reader in 2009, reports "When I got the SDK, the timestamps on the files, particularly the main DLLs, were from 2002" and "As far as I know, an updated SDK for Windows was never released" [community, HN 28652095, 2021-09-25]. Treat any specific year — 2002 or 2003 — as unestablished. What is substantiated is the 32-bit-only DLL, the SAPI 4 lineage of the ViaVoice Outloud sibling, and one first-hand report of 2002-era timestamps in a 2009-issued SDK.

Read as: the classic formant engines (Eloquence, DECtalk, ViaVoice Outloud) have a supply profile the neural ones lack — kilobytes, no weights, no download server, no licence server — and a supply risk the neural ones lack: the code is proprietary, the source is not public, the last commercial NVDA reseller quit in 2024, and what circulates is redistribution nobody in this research established as authorised.

---

What I could not establish in this section

1. Whether espeak-ng's GPL reaches Kokoro, KittenTTS or any other permissively-licensed model as distributed. Open legal question; see 1.3. Repository licences are facts; the reach of one licence into another project's distribution is not readable from a repository.
2. Whether cloud providers other than Amazon permit caching and replay of synthesised audio. Their terms of service were not read; the pricing pages do not address it (section 3).
3. A build date for ETI-Eloquence from any party entitled to state one (section 5.2).
4. Nuance Vocalizer's end-of-life dates from Microsoft or Nuance; the only source located is a competitor's page (section 3).
5. Whether macOS Personal Voice is reachable from say, as opposed to AVSpeechSynthesizer — flagged in the section 2 table as worth confirming and not confirmed here.

05-method-coverage-and-gaps.md

Method, coverage, and negative space

1. Nothing in this catalogue was executed

Read this before anything else. No tool listed here was installed, launched, configured, or timed. Every capability statement in all 1,553 rows comes from a README, a vendor page, an API reference, an issue thread, a package manifest, or a user's report. When a row says a tool "restores the clipboard byte-for-byte", its documentation says so — no clipboard inspector confirmed it. When a row says a tool works in Electron, someone wrote that down; nobody pressed the key in VS Code.

The same is true of the adversarial pass that checked this document: it read sources, registries and the local macOS system, and it ran no catalogued tool either.

Read as: a map of claims with their provenance attached, not a test report. The gap between "documented" and "true on your machine" is yours to close; each row's evidence label tells you how wide it probably is.

The research record

Stage yields as they stand in the final file, FINAL.json [measured, own count over FINAL.json 2026-08-09]:

Stage	What it did	Rows now attributed to it
Round 1	8 blind discovery angles + a completeness critic	747
Round 1 critic	Counted those queries by surface	All 8 angles hit essentially 4 surfaces; 10 source-classes untouched
Round 2	Swept those 10 classes	686
Round 2 critic	Checked round 2 against the already-seen name index	Killed 2 of its own hypotheses; found an error in round 2's output
Verification	CORE rows re-read against primary sources	378 row-records across 12 batch files, 370 unique URLs
Relationship crawl	Forks, derivatives, "inspired by", low-star 2026 tier	110
Community reception	6 venue files	1,016 raw records → 164 per-tool consolidations

The stage column does not sum to 1,553, and here is why. The round field reproduces exactly for rounds 1 and 2 (747 + 686 = 1,433), but 120 rows carry no round value while the relationship crawl is credited with 110. The 10-row difference is rows that entered through the relabelling and verification merges without a round stamp. Stage attribution is therefore approximate at the ±10 level; the band and evidence totals, which are computed directly over FINAL.json, are not.

Round-2 yields by source class [measured, FINAL.json]: forges 131, package registries 125, mechanism-vocabulary 101, non-English 67, forums 52, abandonware/historical 45, remote-headless 43, academic 39, commercial voice supply 36, AT procurement 33, critic sweep 14.

Stage counts drift, and the final file is the arbiter. Mid-flight the stages reported 748 round-1 entries and 747 round-2 rows; the file now attributes 747 and 686, because deduplication and re-banding moved rows between stages after they were logged. Where a stage-time number and FINAL.json disagree, this document uses FINAL.json. The seen-name index the round-2 critic checked against holds 740 names on disk (seen-names.txt, seen-list.txt); an earlier draft described it as a 3,530-key index, which no file here reproduces — treat the size of that index as unestablished.

The round-2 critic's verdict was split: the source-class sweep was saturated, the catalogue was not — novelty had stopped being a function of which source you queried and become one of recency and relationship. The relationship crawl exists because of that, and it is why a re-run in six months will find new rows without new source classes.

2. The evidence ladder

Five labels, applied per row, counted over all 1,553 rows [measured, FINAL.json].

Label	What it means here	Rows
[measured]	An agent read the primary artifact — README, source, API response, docs — and the claim is what it says	885 exact, 895 counting qualified labels
[vendor]	The maker's own unchecked claim, quoted from their product page	319 exact, 321 counting qualified labels
[lead]	Found and named; capability claims never checked against any source	316
[derived]	An inference by the research, not a statement by anyone	21
[community]	A user report, in the 164 sentiment consolidations with a deep link	reception only

Twelve rows carry a qualified or compound label (measured (repo metadata), measured (…) / lead (…)) because part was checked and part was not. The label is not a quality signal: it says how hard the research looked, not how good the thing is.

The verification pass is why [measured] carries weight now. 297 rows from the package-registry and forge sweeps were re-labelled wholesale; 33 kept measured, 193 became vendor, 67 became lead, 4 became derived [measured, own count over relabelled-registries.json]. A registry listing is the packager's description, not the tool's behaviour, and the first pass conflated the two. (An earlier draft of this section gave the base as 226 rows with 193 and 67 downgrades — arithmetic that does not close. The base is 297.)

Per-band distribution, measured / vendor / lead / derived [measured, FINAL.json]:

Band	Split
CORE	279 / 111 / 48 / 10
ADJACENT	388 / 159 / 176 / 7
ENGINE-only	166 / 43 / 68 / 2
OUT-OF-BAND	62 / 8 / 24 / 2

3. Declared coverage limits

Fields that could not be established. Over the 448 CORE rows [measured, FINAL.json, folding blank fields into "unknown"]: clipboard behaviour unknown on 118 (105 recorded unknown, 13 blank), Electron/terminal behaviour unknown on 163 (145 unknown, 18 blank), acquisition method unknown on 44. The first two are what a solo engineer cares about, and the two documentation reliably fails to state.

Three tallies circulated during drafting; one basis now governs. Counts were computed at different times over different subsets — the 378 raw verified rows, the 370 URL-deduplicated verified rows, and all 448 CORE rows in FINAL.json — and the drafts printed all three as if they were the same number. Every count in the published document is now taken from FINAL.json, rows where fit_band == CORE-screen-or-selection-reader, n = 448. For the record, the clipboard field alone reads: 448 CORE no 261 / unknown 105 / yes 60 / blank 13 / n-a 9; 378 raw verified no 206 / unknown 80 / yes 64 / n-a 28; 370 deduplicated no 201 / unknown 80 / yes 61 / n-a 28 [measured, own recount over both files]. Any figure elsewhere that matches none of these three is superseded.

Free-text values were normalised into the enums after the drafts were written. 459 acquisition_method values and 647 platforms lists across the catalogue had escaped their enums into prose ("OCR of a user-defined screen region, triggered by a hotkey"); these were mapped into the coded values, with the original preserved in acquisition_method_raw and platforms_raw. In CORE the change is small — 13 acquisition values and 9 platform lists — but it moved cells, so any cross-tab computed before the normalisation is stale. The cross-tab in section 4 was recomputed after it.

Surfaces reached for that did not open. Of 823 logged search-and-scrape invocations, 91 failed (11.1%) [measured, walking all 20 index.jsonl files in the research tree; an earlier count of 757/85 used a shell glob that skips hidden .research/ and .r2/ directories and undercounted both numbers]:

Failure class	Count	Hosts named in the log
Fetch blocked or failed	34	alternativeto.net (5), askubuntu.com (3), apple.stackexchange.com (2), learn.microsoft.com (2), oralux.net, hear2read.org, stackoverflow.com, superuser.com, dl.acm.org, play.ht, play.ai, cereproc, and 14 others at 1 each
Rendered, no extractable text	21	freedomscientific.com, harposoftware.com, sourceforge.net/directory, instagram.com, nvda-addons.org, and others
YouTube, no transcript	16	youtube.com
gh bad --sort argument	8	GitHub search
Query returned nothing	6	Reddit listings, gh search repos
gh rate limit (HTTP 403)	5	GitHub search
Uncategorised residue	1	duckduckgo.com — "Search failed after 3 attempts. Last error: Request timed out: ConnectTimeout(...)"

The six named classes sum to 90; the residue row above closes the table to the stated 91.

Four of those deserve naming:

• AlternativeTo was unreachable — five fetches failed, and an independent re-test returned HTTP 403 to a scripted request. Its pages render the alternatives list client-side and its JSON endpoint returned a Cloudflare interstitial. It is the one source class indexing tools by substitutability rather than keyword — the axis a keyword sweep cannot see — and it needs a real browser session, which this research lacked.
• The requester's named source was an Instagram feed, which is login-gated — the scrape returned "No extractable content found" at 2026-08-08 23:06:47. The same publisher's web property, gittrend.io, was substituted, its trending and topic pages supplying that angle's rows: a different population, a swap rather than an equivalence.
• SourceForge's directory returned HTTP 403 to every request, including with full browser headers, and was re-confirmed blocked on 2026-08-09. Its per-project REST API (sourceforge.net/rest/p/<slug>) worked and was used instead, so SourceForge coverage is sampled rather than enumerated.
• Academic search used general web search, not a scholar-specific tool. The 39 academic rows surfaced through ordinary queries and DOI resolution; no citation-graph traversal ran.

Four sites are behind bot walls, and readers clicking those links will be blocked too.

• AppleVis returns a Cloudflare "Just a moment…" interstitial to any scripted fetch, with and without browser headers. Four AppleVis-sourced claims in this document — Siri voices skipping reproducible chunks in Kindle, Eloquence mispronouncing iOS/iPadOS/macOS/watchOS under the Community Dictionary, the Dolphin thread, and a 2022 Screen Sharing/VNC comment — were verified only against the on-disk corpus, which holds the verbatim quotes and dates. The links are given so you can open them in a normal browser; a scripted fetch of them will fail. [measured, four fetch attempts 2026-08-09]
• support.freedomscientific.com returns a 60-character body to a scripted fetch. Its content was closed through a Wayback capture of 2026-07-07, which carries the version-1/version-2 voice compatibility split verbatim. Cite the Wayback URL alongside the live one.
• sourceforge.net/directory, alternativeto.net and stackoverflow.com all return HTTP 403 to scripted fetches and could be confirmed only as blocked — no substitute capture was obtained for them.

The verification pass was itself partial. The adversarial reviewer tested link resolution for all 231 distinct URLs in the six section drafts and found zero dead links, but read the primary source for only about 70 load-bearing claims. The ADJACENT and OUT-OF-BAND catalogue tables were not attacked at all — only the six prose sections were. A claim in those two tables carries its row's evidence label and nothing more.

A known layer-data defect, disclosed rather than silently fixed. The band labels and the raw layers field disagree for part of the catalogue. 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows still carry L1-ACQUIRE or L2-TRIGGER in their own layers list — among them macOS /usr/bin/say, Gespeaker, tts-overlay, voiced, Glate and isimud-text-to-speech — usually because the project reads a file or a caller-supplied argument rather than the screen. In the other direction, 2 of the 448 CORE rows lack one of the two: Speakonia (CFS-Technologies) and ReadPlease has no L2, MS Edge TTS Extension (yacine-bens) has no L1. The verification pass covered the CORE band only, so the ENGINE-only layer tags were never re-checked. Where band and layer list disagree, the band is the considered judgement and the layer list is the raw annotation — but a reader who filters on layers will get a different answer from one who filters on the band. [measured, own count over FINAL.json]

Verification thinned where the language barrier thickened. Several non-English rows carry explicit "not verified against the product" notes — a German vendor's "mark text and have it read" phrasing, a French-distributed suite's acquisition scope — kept as vendor claims because the agent could not confirm them in the source language.

One negative claim rests on an unrun search. Amazon Polly's pricing page states that "you can cache and replay Amazon Polly's generated speech at no additional cost" [measured, pricing]. Whether any other cloud vendor permits caching and replay is governed by terms of service that were not read — neither by the research nor by the verification pass. Treat the Polly clause as the one found, not as the only one that exists.

Community reception covers a slice, and the size of the slice depends on the matching rule. 164 of the 653 sentiment targets ended with at least one record, so 489 targets generated zero records [measured, sentiment-targets.txt has 653 non-empty lines and its first line is a real target, not a header]. Mapping those 164 consolidations back onto catalogue rows requires a name-matching rule, and the answer moves with it: matching on the name head or an owner/repo slug touches 121 of 1,553 catalogue rows (8%) and 43 of 448 CORE rows (10%) [measured, own match 2026-08-09]. An earlier pass reported 178 and 61 under a rule that was not recorded and could not be reproduced; prefer the stated rule or treat the coverage as approximate. Silence there means nobody was found talking about a tool, not that nobody uses it. Stance across the 164 skews toward friction (broken-for-me 35, install-friction 17, quality-complaint 13, against works-for-me 20, quality-praise 1) — what forums and issue trackers select for.

The sentiment corpus is 1,016 records across 986 unique URLs, in six venue files: Hacker News 168, YouTube 189, AT forums 128, issue trackers 104, r/Blind-tier subreddits 208, r/LocalLLaMA-tier subreddits 219 [measured, own count over the six files]. An earlier figure of roughly 1,300 double-counted sentiment-reddit-accessibility.json, which is a strict subset of sentiment-reddit-accessibility-full.json — 174 rows against 208, with zero URLs unique to the subset. The accessibility split is r/Blind 73, r/audiobooks 42, r/AssistiveTechnology 32, r/Dyslexia 29, r/accessibility 29, r/tts 3 = 208. At 29 records, r/Dyslexia is the smallest input for the population this document is written for.

4. Negative space — what does not exist

Everything in this section was recomputed from FINAL.json after the enum normalisation, over the 448 CORE rows [measured, own cross-tabulation 2026-08-09]. A zero cell is a finding.

Platform against acquisition method. Platforms are multi-valued, so a row appears in every platform column it claims; the acquisition method is single-valued, so each row appears exactly once per row across the method columns.

Platform (CORE rows)	browser-DOM	clipboard-watch	AX-selection	AX-follow-focus	OCR-region	simulated-copy	OCR-full	document-parse	unknown
Windows (198)	10	47	8	35	37	32	5	2	22
macOS (134)	10	18	39	8	7	27	2	1	22
browser-extension (95)	78	2	0	1	7	2	0	1	4
Linux-unspecified (48)	7	11	0	11	4	6	0	2	7
Linux-X11 (40)	1	8	18	3	5	3	1	0	1
Android (28)	7	2	3	10	1	0	2	1	2
Linux-Wayland (28)	0	6	12	3	5	1	0	0	1
iOS (16)	7	1	2	2	0	0	1	1	2
web (4)	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
headless-server (3)	0	0	0	3	0	0	0	0	0
unknown-legacy (2)	0	0	0	1	1	0	0	0	0

Column totals over all 448 CORE rows, for checking: browser-DOM 82, clipboard-watch 73, selection-via-accessibility-API 68, accessibility-tree-follow-focus 61, OCR-screen-region 53, selection-via-simulated-copy 51, unknown 44, OCR-full-screen 13, document-parse 3. Eight of the nine columns account for every row. The OCR-full-screen column shows 10 rather than 13 because three CORE rows carry no platform list at all — the DOS and OS/2-era cluster (IBM Screen Reader and Screen Reader/2, Vocal-Eyes, jmdaweb/habla), which the platform enum has no value for. No CORE platform value falls outside the eleven rows above. The rows sum above 448 because a tool appears in every platform it claims.

Compound conditions.

Combination sought	CORE rows
Windows and macOS and some Linux, with selection-via-accessibility-API, clipboard no, runtime local-only	0 (27 rows are tri-platform; 1 of those uses selection-via-accessibility-API — Pot, whose clipboard field is unknown and whose runtime is hybrid)
Same, relaxed to either accessibility route	1 (Fenrir — accessibility-tree-follow-focus, clipboard no, local-only)
Tri-platform, clipboard no and local-only, any acquisition method	5
Android with selection-via-simulated-copy	0
iOS/iPadOS with local-only synthesis	1 (Orate)
iOS/iPadOS with OCR of a screen region	0
iOS/iPadOS with OCR of the full screen	1 (Apple VoiceOver Recognition — coded OCR-full-screen, not region)
Headless or SSH-reachable	3 (speakup + espeakup, YASR, TDSR — all console-framebuffer, all accessibility-tree-follow-focus)
Linux-X11 with full-screen OCR	1 (OCRdesktop) — against 5 X11 rows doing region OCR
Wayland, selection-via-accessibility-API, local-only, status active	9 of 28 Wayland CORE rows (11 if accessibility-tree-follow-focus is included)

Read as: three shapes nobody has built, on this catalogue's coding.

• The cross-platform clipboard-safe reader. 27 CORE rows run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and none of them combines accessibility-API selection capture with a non-destructive clipboard and local-only synthesis. Tri-platform tools exist; they reach the text through the clipboard or a browser DOM rather than through three accessibility backends. Relaxing to any accessibility route yields exactly one row.
• A current headless answer. The three headless rows are Linux console readers from an earlier era. A remote GUI session over SSH has no catalogued reader short of a full remote-desktop deployment.
• An iOS story outside Apple's stack. 16 CORE rows list iOS; 1 runs synthesis locally, 1 does OCR, and that one is Apple's. Region OCR on iOS is a zero cell.

Two caveats that are not claims of absence. First, the catalogue stores one acquisition method per row, so it cannot express a tool that tries accessibility first and falls back to OCR or the clipboard; a free-text search across CORE row prose finds 43 rows using the word "fallback" and 54 describing a clipboard save-and-restore, none of which the coded field can show. Second, 707 of 1,553 rows live off GitHub (33 DOIs, 30 GitLab, 29 Codeberg, 21 SourceForge, 18 Launchpad, plus app stores and vendor sites), so a GitHub-only refresh sees 846 rows — 54.5% of the catalogue.

5. How to re-run this

Star counts, push dates, and status fields were read on 2026-08-08 and 2026-08-09. They will be wrong later. These are the commands that produced them.

Refresh every GitHub row (846 rows, 54.5% of the catalogue):

for r in owner/repo ... ; do
  gh api "repos/$r" --jq '[.full_name,(.stargazers_count|tostring),(.license.spdx_id // "none"),
    (.pushed_at[0:10]),(.created_at[0:10]),(.language // "-"),(.description // "")]|@tsv'
done

Re-run discovery, plus the recency tier where the round-2 critic said novelty now lives:

gh search repos --topic=tts --topic=text-to-speech --topic=speech-synthesis \
  --sort stars --limit 40 --json fullName,stargazersCount,description,updatedAt,language,license,url
gh api "search/repositories?q=speak%20selection%20hotkey%20menubar%20in%3Aname%2Cdescription%2Creadme&sort=stars&order=desc&per_page=20"
gh search repos "read selection aloud" --created=">2026-01-01" --sort=stars --limit=25 \
  --json fullName,stargazersCount,description,updatedAt,language

--sort best-match is not a valid value for gh search repos and cost this sweep 8 invocations; the valid values are stars, forks, help-wanted-issues and updated.

The mechanism vocabulary found tools no product-name search reaches. Search these API identifiers in code and READMEs, not the words "text to speech": kAXSelectedTextAttribute, AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue, IUIAutomationTextPattern, TextPattern.GetSelection, UIA_TextPatternId, AT-SPI2 / Text.get_text_at_offset, wlr-data-control and ext-data-control-v1 (wayland.app), xdg-desktop-portal GlobalShortcuts, XFixesSelectSelectionInput, PRIMARY selection, clipnotify, wl-paste --watch, ControlGetText, NSPasteboard, CGEventTap, SAPI5.

Non-GitHub forges: curl -s https://sourceforge.net/rest/p/<slug> (directory pages are Cloudflare-blocked; the REST endpoint is not). Codeberg, GitLab, Launchpad and salsa.debian.org were swept through their own search UIs.

Community reception: Hacker News via the Algolia API (https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=<q>&tags=story&numericFilters=created_at_i><epoch>); individual HN comments via the Firebase item API (https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/<id>.json), which is what to use when the web front end answers 405 or 429; Reddit via old.reddit.com listing pages; plus AppleVis, NVDA and Orca issue trackers and YouTube transcripts.

Local macOS reads used in the platform sections: sw_vers, say -v '?', defaults read com.apple.speech.synthesis.general.prefs, defaults read com.apple.universalaccess, and pbs -dump — note that pbs is not on PATH; it lives at /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs, and the first attempt fails without the full path.

Rate limits bind. Five sweeps here died on HTTP 403: API rate limit exceeded; space gh search calls by ~2.5 seconds.

6. What this document deliberately does not do

It does not recommend, rank, score, or shortlist — the requester's explicit instruction. No tool is called good and none is placed above another. Where a superlative appears it sits inside quotation marks, attributed to whoever said it.

Nothing found was discarded. Rows that plainly do not fit are still here — MS-DOS readers, a Symbian screen reader, discontinued products, libraries with no user interface — because a catalogue that quietly drops its misfits gives the reader no way to tell exhaustive from curated.

The four bands are scope descriptions, not quality judgements. CORE is assigned when a tool both gets text off the screen (L1-ACQUIRE) and lets a human invoke it on what is in front of them (L2-TRIGGER). ENGINE-only synthesises speech but somebody else hands it the text. ADJACENT does part of the job, or does it inside a single application. OUT-OF-BAND surfaced in the sweep and is not a reader. The band is assigned by reading what the project does, not by trusting the layers field — see the layer-data defect declared in section 3, where 57 ENGINE-only rows and 2 CORE rows have layer lists that disagree with their band. A polished commercial product can sit in ADJACENT and a 6-star weekend project in CORE; that says nothing about which you would rather use, only which layers each owns.

The decision is the reader's; this section exists so they know how much weight each row carries when they make it.

06-appendix-S-stack-notes.md

Appendix S — Stack annotation (strippable)

This appendix is separable, and it is the only part of the document that is. It is the sole place where the reader's own machines appear. Delete everything from this heading to the end of the file and no fact stated anywhere else in the catalogue changes — nothing in the entry tables, the mechanism anatomy, the supply survey or the sentiment corpus depends on a single line below. The appendix consumes catalogue facts; it never supplies them.

Nothing here is advice. Every item states a consequence of a catalogued property on one specific setup — "if X is installed, Y follows". No entry says what to choose, no entry ranks, and no entry says "you should". Where a consequence cuts both ways, both directions are stated and neither is preferred.

Nothing here was executed. No tool was installed, no RDP session was opened, no hotkey was pressed, no Citrix or Jump Desktop connection was made. Every statement below is read from a repository, a source file, a vendor page, a protocol specification, or the catalogue's own fields. The remote-desktop subsection (S.3) is entirely protocol-spec and vendor-matrix reading and says so again in place.

Setup assumed: a MacBook Air on macOS 26.x, where Apple's Speak Selection is reached by Option+Q through a Karabiner-Elements mapping onto Shift+F13 (combo 617 in com.apple.speech.synthesis.general.prefs), with Rectangle on the F14 family and the input-source switch on Option+F13; plus a Windows desktop over RDP from Microsoft's Windows App and Jump Desktop. Terminal work happens in Ghostty.

---

S.1 — AX-selection readers on macOS, and what a second global hotkey owner costs

Filtering the catalogue's CORE band (n = 448) for rows whose acquisition method is selection-via-accessibility-API returns 68 entries. Of those, 44 record the clipboard as undisturbed, 39 list macOS among their platforms, and 19 are both on macOS and clipboard-safe [measured, own count over FINAL.json, 2026-08-09].

Two earlier figures circulated while this appendix was being drafted — "52 macOS tools, 37 non-destructive" and "47 rows, 23 explicit no". Neither reproduces against the file on disk under any band, platform or de-duplication filter that was tried, and both are withdrawn rather than reconciled. The figures in the paragraph above are the only AX-selection counts this appendix uses [measured; withdrawal recorded rather than silently corrected].

The 19 macOS AX-selection rows recorded clipboard-safe, named in full so the count can be checked: macOS Spoken Content / Speak Selection and its second catalogue row, the Automator Quick Action "Speak text" route, the Services item "Speech > Start Speaking Text", MLXRead, popclip-azure-text-to-speech, better-macos-speak-selection, LivingTTS, Subvocal, hibiki, speed-read, Dictater, TextGO, Xpop, Flick, Raycast MiMo TTS, Murmur, text-listener-app, Sotto [measured].

Two disclosures the number needs: four of the 19 are Apple's own native routes held as four separate catalogue rows, so the count of distinct third-party projects is 15; and of the remaining 20 macOS AX-selection rows, 6 record the clipboard as clobbered and 13 record unknown, with 1 row carrying no value at all [measured].

The structural fact for this setup: the F-key bus works because every hotkey owner was moved to an address only Karabiner can dial. A new tool joins that scheme only if its chord can be re-recorded onto an F-key. A chord fixed in source cannot be moved onto the bus, and registers at the OS level exactly the way the screen-capture hotkey did when it collided.

Catalogued macOS AX-selection readers, grouped by whether the chord can be moved:

Chord ownership	Tools	Evidence
Re-recordable in the tool's own settings	TrayTalk ("a global hotkey the user records in Preferences"), Sotto, Subvocal, speed-read, Narrateify ("all remappable"), MoePeek, Supertonic Read Selection	[measured] from each README
Fixed in source — cannot be moved onto the bus	better-macos-speak-selection: Option+Escape via Carbon RegisterEventHotKey, with optionEscape, optionMinus and optionEqual hard-coded as Carbon kVK_ constants in Hotkeys/HotkeyBinding.swift and no configuration path (repository has 0 stars). MLXRead: Option+Escape event tap, its README stating you must disable or reassign Apple's own Option+Escape yourself because "MLXRead will not change it for you". hibiki (Option+F) and Yapper (Ctrl+Shift+S, 0 stars) document no configuration.	[measured], source read
No global chord at all — nothing to collide	Xpop and Flick (popup on selection), Voice Reader (floating button + hover), TextGO (double-click / shift-click / drag-select rules), popclip-azure-text-to-speech (rides PopClip's bar)	[measured]
Chord owned by a launcher, not the tool	Raycast extensions Read AI, Azure Speech TTS, Doubao TTS, MiniMax TTS, MiMo TTS, AI Voice Studio — launcher commands, hotkey assigned per command inside Raycast	[measured]

Consequences on this setup. A row-2 tool alongside Apple's Speak Selection means two OS-level owners of one chord, resolved by whichever registered first — the capture-tool failure mode again, and not repairable from Karabiner, which redirects what it is asked to send but cannot un-register a chord a running app already claimed. MLXRead states the case outright: it and Apple's feature both want Option+Escape.

A row-1 tool records onto a free F-key address and joins the scheme — Option+Q keeps dialling Speak Selection while a second chord dials the new reader, or Option+Q is repointed and combo 617 sits unused.

Rows 3 and 4 add no OS-level chord owner. In row 3 the trigger is the selection gesture itself: no bus address is consumed, and no per-app scoping through Karabiner is possible either — the popup appears in every app exposing a selection. Row 4 means Raycast is the one new owner however many extensions are installed.

One catalogued item collides on this exact chord: Namida OCR's README states "By default, Alt + Q on windows and Option + Q on mac activates the snipping mode" [measured, README line 21] — the chord Karabiner currently uses to reach Speak Selection. The repository has 15 stars [measured, gh api 2026-08-09].

Read as: the F-key bus constrains the trigger layer only. It says nothing about whether a tool's acquisition or voices suit the reader; it decides whether the tool can be installed without disturbing the arrangement already working.

---

S.2 — The Electron and terminal hole

An AX-based reader returns nothing when an app does not publish kAXSelectedText. Ghostty is a terminal; editors in daily use are frequently Electron. Catalogued tools carrying a documented answer on macOS:

Tool	Documented reach	Label
speed-read	README names "Safari, Chrome, Preview PDFs, VS Code, Slack, Mail, Terminal"	[measured]
SpeakPro	README line 3: a TTS add-on "for iTerm2 (and Terminal.app, Warp, Ghostty, kitty — anything that copies selection to clipboard)". Acquires by pbpaste on a ⌘⌃S macOS Shortcut, catalogued clipboard-watch, clipboard_destructive: no, works_in_electron_or_terminal: yes. MIT, 1 star, created 2026-05-07, pushed 2026-05-18	[measured, README + gh api 2026-08-09]
Murmur	Author's list: "Chrome, Safari, PDFs, Terminal, VS Code, Notes, Slack, Gmail, Markdown"	[vendor], untested
Aloud	README: "Works in every app, including Electron ones like VS Code, Cursor, Slack, and Discord, where the built-in macOS Speak Selection silently does nothing"	[vendor], repo one day old at crawl
TDSR	Reads the PTY screen buffer via pyte — not an accessibility tree at all	[measured]
Fish Screen Reader	OCR of the screen or a chosen window — indifferent to whether text is exposed	[measured]
better-macos-speak-selection	partial — AX first, then a Cmd+C fallback that snapshots the pasteboard, polls changeCount (CHANGE_COUNT_POLL_TIMEOUT = .milliseconds(150), interval 10 ms) and restores only if the count moved	[measured] from Swift source

Unknown for this dimension: MLXRead, LivingTTS, Subvocal, hibiki, Narrateify, ReadMe, Voice Reader, TextGO, Flick, Vosh, Dictater, and every Raycast extension listed above. Across the whole CORE band, 145 of 448 rows record works_in_electron_or_terminal: unknown, with a further 18 carrying no value at all; the recorded values are 118 yes, 70 n/a, 49 partial, 48 no [measured, count over FINAL.json]. On the macOS subset (134 CORE rows) the unknown count is 59 [measured]. Apple's own Speak Selection is recorded twice with conflicting values, partial and unknown; the catalogue does not settle it.

Ghostty specifically is named in three catalogued rows, not one [measured, string search over FINAL.json]:

• Yapper's source comments: "Terminals with copy-on-select (Ghostty) put a finished selection on the pasteboard immediately, but TUI apps that redraw constantly (Claude Code) clear the visible selection before our Cmd+C lands" [measured].
• SpeakPro, which names Ghostty in its supported list and states the precondition explicitly — the terminal must be set to copy selection to clipboard ("iTerm2 → Settings → General → Selection → ☑ 'Copy to clipboard on selection'") [measured].
• The OSC 52 escape sequence row, whose reference page reports support in 10 of 14 tested backends including Ghostty [measured].

On this setup that means a clipboard-watching reader hears a Ghostty selection with no explicit copy step, provided copy-on-select is enabled, while a simulated-copy reader can lose a selection inside a redrawing TUI. SpeakPro's ⌘⌃S sits outside the F-key bus and outside the Option+Q address, so it adds one OS-level chord owner that collides with nothing in the arrangement described above [derived, from its README and the bus layout].

Read as: the split is between reading text the app publishes and reading the pixels or the buffer. The tools in the table reach the terminal by a different L1 route, not by a stronger AX implementation.

---

S.3 — Inside the RDP window: three configurations

All of S.3 is spec-reading and vendor-matrix reading. None of it was tested on this setup. No RDP session was opened through either client, and no catalogued tool was run inside one.

The structural cause: RDP transmits a framebuffer plus a clipboard channel and exposes no accessibility channel for remote UI, so a local AX/UIA client asking a remote-desktop window for its selected text gets the window, not the remote document — recorded against FreeRDP and the Windows UIA platform row [derived], and stated as the motivating problem by the Sinter prototype, an "Accessible Remote Desktop Protocol" transmitting UI semantics instead of pixels [measured; 3 stars, last pushed 2021-01-29 — a research prototype, not a shipping option].

Consequence: every AX-selection reader in S.1, including Apple's Speak Selection, returns nothing for text inside the RDP window. That is not a bug in any of them.

Of the three routes into that window, the reading of Microsoft's own client feature matrix (remote-desktop-app-compare, table read 2026-08-09) puts them in three different states from a macOS client — the clipboard path documented and open, the virtual-channel path documented and closed, the audio path documented and open:

Configuration	Mechanism	Cost on this setup
1. Clipboard route, reader on the Mac	In all three client tables on Microsoft's page the row "Clipboard - bidirectional" carries a bare ✅ in the macOS column with no footnote, where iOS/iPadOS carries footnote 1 "Text and images only." and Android/Chrome OS and the web client carry footnote 2 "Text only." macOS is the only non-Windows client whose bidirectional cell states no format restriction. The feature is defined on the same page as "Redirect the clipboard on the local device is to the remote session and from the remote session to the local device" [measured, Microsoft docs]. A separate footnote 3, attached to the unidirectional row, adds "macOS support is native in the Remote Desktop client. All other platforms require remote session configuration." Text copied in the Windows session therefore lands on the macOS pasteboard, where a clipboard-watch reader can speak it — 73 CORE rows use clipboard-watch acquisition, 18 of them listing macOS [measured].	An explicit Cmd/Ctrl+C in the remote session for every passage. Non-selectable remote content (an image, a game, a legacy control) yields nothing. Jump Desktop's clipboard behaviour in the remote-to-local direction is not established here: its support pages are behind a bot wall that returns an interstitial to any scripted fetch (S.7). Configuration 1 is documented for Microsoft's client and assumed for Jump Desktop.
2. OCR the RDP window from the Mac	Region OCR reads pixels, so it is indifferent to the protocol and to the missing accessibility channel. 53 CORE rows use OCR-screen-region, 7 of them on macOS [measured]. Catalogued macOS region-OCR readers: Fish Screen Reader, manga-voice-reader, read-screen, pot-desktop-with-OCR-translator. Sensory Readable's Text Extractor names the scenario outright: "Remote desktop windows — content displayed inside RDP, Citrix, VirtualBox, VMware" [measured].	Text must be legible at the RDP scaling in use. Fish Screen Reader states "This app may upload your screenshot to OCR services to recognize", listing Azure, Google Vision or a bundled offline engine [measured] — on that path an image of the remote session leaves the machine. Sensory's Text Extractor writes the extracted text to the clipboard by design [measured], so it consumes the same resource configuration 1 depends on.
3. Reader inside the Windows session, audio over RDP	NVDA on the Windows box sees real UIA, plus NVDA+r Windows OCR for objects exposing no text, plus documented Windows Console and Windows Terminal support [measured, NVDA user guide]. The audio path is open: "Speakers" is marked ✅ on every client platform in all three of Microsoft's client tables, macOS included [measured], and the protocol extension behind it, MS-RDPEA, is specified as "transfer[ring] audio data from the server to the client" [measured, page read 2026-08-09].	The accessibility virtual channels are closed from this client, for three independent documented reasons. (a) Microsoft's matrix marks "Third-party virtual channel plugins" ✅ on the Windows MSI and MSTSC clients and ❌ on the Windows Store client, macOS, iOS/iPadOS, Android/Chrome OS and the web client, in all three tables [measured]. (b) rdAccess's own README requires the add-on "installed on both the client and the server in NVDA", and NVDA is a Windows program — there is no client copy to install on a Mac [measured, README line 8; 15 stars]. (c) Freedom Scientific's remote-access page requires its software "installed correctly on both the client work station as well as the server", after which "the version of JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion on the remote computer sends information through a virtual channel which then relays this output on the client computer through speech, braille, or magnification" [measured, vendor page via Wayback 2025-08-09 — the live page returns a bot interstitial]. The same vendor documents the fallback that a macOS client is left with, and it is configuration 3: install on the server only, in which case "remote authorization is not necessary since nothing is installed on the client. You will experience lower performance as the Freedom Scientific virtual channels are not installed. This means that there will be no braille output on the client and speech will be routed using standard Windows audio and port forwarding" [measured, same page]. Speech therefore rides the audio channel with whatever latency that adds — and this is a full screen-reader session, not a select-then-hotkey utility.

Read as: from a macOS client the three paths are not equally available and not equally documented. Two are open by the vendors' own tables (clipboard, audio) and one is closed by them (third-party virtual channels), and the closure is stated three times over by three different documents rather than inferred once. What none of the three documents is latency, quality or whether any of it works in practice — none of that was tested.

---

S.4 — The clipboard cost of a simulated-copy reader

Across the 448 CORE rows, 60 record the clipboard as clobbered to obtain a selection and 261 record it as undisturbed; 105 are unknown, 9 are n/a, and 13 carry no value [measured, count over FINAL.json]. The cost concentrates in one mechanism: of the 51 rows acquiring by selection-via-simulated-copy, 39 clobber the clipboard, 8 do not and 4 are unknown [measured].

Consequence while editing: each invocation of a clobbering tool replaces whatever was on the pasteboard. Reading a paragraph mid-edit destroys the snippet held for pasting, and the loss is silent.

Three catalogued mitigations, all [measured] from source or README: better-macos-speak-selection snapshots every pasteboard item, posts a synthetic Cmd+C, polls changeCount for 150 ms at 10 ms intervals, then restores only if the count moved; speed-read's "Cmd-C fallback snapshots and restores your full clipboard (images, RTF, files), verifies ownership via change count, and restores again if a delayed copy arrives after timeout"; Murmur has a "clipboard-copy fallback that restores your clipboard."

Separately, the clipboard is the acquisition route in configuration 1 above — so on this setup it is at once the thing being protected on the Mac side and the deliberate transport across RDP. The OSC 52 escape sequence, supported by Ghostty among 10 of 14 tested terminals, has the same property: it overwrites the local clipboard by definition, and the catalogue records it clipboard_destructive: yes for that reason [measured].

Read as: "clipboard-safe" and "clipboard-clobbering" are properties of the acquisition mechanism, not of the tool's quality, and on this setup they interact — a reader that protects the pasteboard locally and a reader that consumes it as an RDP transport are answering different questions.

---

S.5 — Local-only versus cloud

Of the 448 CORE rows, 253 run local-only; 75 hybrid, 56 cloud-API, 39 OS-native, 25 unknown [measured, count over FINAL.json].

Consequence of the cloud path, stated factually: a cloud-API reader transmits the acquired text to a third party on every invocation, and what is acquired is whatever is selected or on screen at that moment — on this setup, source under edit, mail, and the remote Windows session when reading via configuration 1 or 2. An OCR-over-cloud tool transmits an image of the region instead; Fish Screen Reader states this outright [measured, S.3]. Retention and training terms were not established (S.7).

Consequence of the local path: models download and run on the machine. MLXRead documents Kokoro at roughly 360 MB or Soprano at roughly 200 MB, Apple Silicon and macOS 14+, offline after a first-synthesis asset fetch; Aloud documents Kokoro-82M at roughly 310 MB [both measured]. Apple's Speak Selection downloads nothing and sends nothing.

---

S.6 — The dyslexia-versus-blindness evidence split (open question, not answered here)

Much of the community evidence in the sentiment corpus comes from blind daily users and points toward old formant synthesis, for reasons tied to a use case that is not this reader's. Quoted and attributed:

• "blind people do not like any lag when reading that's is why so many still use eloquence and espeak" — [community], HN 44809136. Working speeds reported as normal in that corpus: 600–1200 wpm and 700+ wpm, one ETI-Eloquence user reporting an average near 730 wpm, another reporting eSpeak understandable near 1,000 wpm [community; r/Blind, AppleVis, Hacker News].
• The mechanism claimed: "Neural TTS always has differences in how they say a thing, and at times, those differences can be large enough to trip me up" — [community], HN 40234673.

The counter-report, from a dyslexic user, is in the same corpus and reverses the conclusion:

"I depend on TTS to overcome dyslexia, but I also struggle with auditory processing disorder that causes me to misunderstand words. As a result, classical TTS does not help me read faster or more accurately than struggling through my dyslexia. It causes me to rapidly fatigue, zone out, and rewind often, in a way that is more severe than when I sight read. On the other hand, modern neural TTS is a huge enabler." — [community], HN 40238926

A third point sits between them: a self-described slow reader (not blind) reports parsing about 400 wpm through xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400, and that it also helped a dyslexic relative — [community], HN 15506074. The dyslexia element of that report is second-hand, about the relative, so it is a third position rather than either pole.

Consequence on this setup: the low-latency, high-rate argument rests on 450–1200 wpm pattern-matching as a primary reading channel. The stated use here is assistive daily reading alongside sight, not sole-channel navigation at those rates. The corpus holds first-hand reports from people with dyslexia on both sides, disagreeing with each other. The catalogue does not resolve which applies, and nothing in it can — it is an empirical question about one person's comprehension at speed.

---

S.7 — What this appendix could not establish

1. The AX-selection counts that once disagreed have been withdrawn, not reconciled. Two figures circulated during drafting — 52/37 and 47/23 — and neither could be reproduced from FINAL.json under any band or de-duplication filter. They are removed. S.1's 68 / 44 / 39 / 19 is a single count over the CORE band on one date and has not been reproduced by a second party.
2. All of S.3 is untested. Every RDP statement is read from Microsoft's feature matrix, the MS-RDPEA specification, NVDA's and rdAccess's READMEs, and Freedom Scientific's vendor page. Nothing was run against an actual RDP session through either client, and no catalogued tool was exercised inside one. The matrix documents feature availability, not latency, quality or whether any particular reader behaves as its README says.
3. Jump Desktop's remote-to-local clipboard is unverified. Its support pages return a Cloudflare interstitial to any scripted fetch (attempted 2026-08-09), so the direction question could not be closed from a primary source. Configuration 1 is documented for Microsoft's client and assumed for Jump Desktop.
4. Ghostty is named in three catalogued rows — Yapper's source comments, SpeakPro's README and the OSC 52 reference page. An earlier draft of this appendix said "exactly one", which was wrong. None of the three is a test of Ghostty AX-selection support: two describe the clipboard path and one describes an escape sequence.
5. Cloud retention and training terms were not established for any cloud-API reader. S.5 states only that text or images are transmitted, not what happens afterwards.
6. Apple's Speak Selection has conflicting Electron/terminal values in the catalogue (partial and unknown, on two of the four rows that hold Apple's native routes). Nothing here settles it.
7. The catalogue's band labels and its layers field disagree in places, which matters to anyone who re-runs the filters above. 57 of the 279 ENGINE-only rows still carry L1-ACQUIRE or L2-TRIGGER in their own layer list, and 2 of the 448 CORE rows lack one of the two. The verification pass covered the CORE band only; the ENGINE-only layer tags were never re-checked [measured, count over FINAL.json]. Every count in this appendix is taken over fit_band, not over layers; a reader who filters by layers instead will get different numbers.
8. No tool was installed or run. Every claim above is document-read, source-read or field-counted.

catalogue-adjacent.md

Catalogue — Adjacent — brokers, OCR-to-clipboard, voice supply, document-scoped readers, protocols, harnesses

730 entries. Evidence tier: M measured (source read) · V vendor claim · L lead, unverified · D derived.

Acq = acquisition mechanism. Clipboard = does reading a selection clobber your clipboard. Superlatives appearing in these cells sit inside attributed quotations; the catalogue does not rank.

Tool	Plat	What it is	Runtime	Status	Stars	Licence	Ev
audiocpp-android (CaptainArni)	and	Android companion to audio.cpp Studio: photograph a book page, OCR it, and listen with follow-along highlighting, background playback and cloned voice	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
CopiloTTS	and/ios	Kotlin Multiplatform TTS SDK using either native OS TTS or ONNX Runtime.	hybrid	?	29	MIT	M
ElevenReader	and/legacy	ElevenLabs' consumer reading app: converts articles, PDFs and ePubs to streaming audio in 32+ languages with synced text highlighting.	cloud-API	?		Proprietary, f	L
Glyfen (F-Droid)	and	"Offline OCR for Android. Search your photos by text, entirely on-device" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
Imgspeaker	and	Android app that performs OCR on Simplified Chinese images and reads the extracted text aloud.	unknown	?	5	see repo	L
nabu	and	Android on-device test bench for TTS and local LLM chat — Kokoro-82M, Supertonic v2/v3 and Soprano 1.1 through ONNX Runtime, plus a book workflow that	local-only	active	56	GPL-3.0	M
nabu-realtime (richdrummer33 fork of nabu)	and	Fork of the Android multi-engine TTS/LLM app nabu, adding chunked playback and background processing.	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-3.0	M
News Reader (livio) (F-Droid)	and	"Minimalistic yet powerful news reader with text to speech capability" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
OCR (Subhamtyagi) (F-Droid)	and	"OCR based on Tesseract 5" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
Offline Translator (F-Droid)	and	"On-device translation of text, images and pdf/odt files, with TTS" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
pdf-reader-aloud	and	Android PDF reader (v0.2) that extracts text with PdfBox-Android, chunks it by sentence and speaks it with a bundled Piper en_US-amy-medium voice thro	local-only	dormant	0	none declared	M
Poet Assistant (F-Droid)	and	"Dictionary and TTS tools for editing poems" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
Shravan	and	Open-source Android app for visually impaired users providing offline real-time text reading (OCR) and object detection with voice output.	local-only	?	6	open source (s	L
speakword.koplugin	and/lin	KOReader plugin that speaks selected words or sentences on an e-reader via Android system TTS or ElevenLabs.	hybrid	?	0	AGPL-3.0	L
TextLector (nedmah)	and/ios	Free offline TTS reader for Android and iOS built with Kotlin Multiplatform, positioned in its README as a Speechify alternative.	local-only	active	7	Apache-2.0	L
tts-tool (felixvonberlin)	and	'A simple GUI for android's Text-To-Speech-Engines', published on Google Play as de.favo.ttst.	os-native	unknown	2	unknown	L
Udderance AAC (F-Droid)	and	"TTS based AAC" [vendor] — augmentative and alternative communication board.	local-only	active		unknown	V
Voice Notify (F-Droid)	and	"Spoken notifications" [vendor] — speaks incoming Android notifications aloud.	local-only	active		unknown	V
Wyoming Android TTS (F-Droid)	and	"Use your Android's TTS engines in Home Assistant via the Wyoming protocol" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
dotool	X11/Wl/legacy	uinput-based input simulator that reads commands on stdin and supports keyboard layouts; named alongside ydotool and kwtype as a KDE-Wayland paste met	local-only	active		unknown	L
screenshot-osr-linux	X11	Russian-language shell script positioned as an alternative to ABBYY Screenshot Reader: bind a key (e.g. Ctrl+PrtSc), it takes a gnome-screenshot, clea	local-only	dormant	0	unknown	M
ttsclip (connbrack)	X11/Wl	Bash CLI for Linux that speaks an argument or the clipboard through Amazon Polly, with flags for tempo and for replacing line breaks; the README's own	cloud-API	dormant	1	none declared	M
xmag	X11	'Utility to display a magnified snapshot of a portion of an X11 screen' — the X.Org original, hosted only on freedesktop GitLab.	local-only	unknown	0	MIT/X11 (X.Org	V
[xterm OSC 52 selection read (printf '\033]52;s;?\007')](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/318673/access-highlighted-text-from-script)	X11	Second answer to 'Access highlighted text from script?': normally you cannot, but xterm's Manipulate Selection Data control sequence will reply with t	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
ydotool	X11/Wl/legacy	'Generic command-line automation tool' that injects input through /dev/uinput, so it works under Wayland where xdotool cannot; requires the ydotoold d	local-only	active	2321	AGPL-3.0	M
a11y-profile-manager	lin	GPL-3 tool that 'facilitates the easy enablement of specific settings to improve the accessibility of a desktop environment' — the Ubuntu accessibilit	local-only	dormant		GPL-3 (Launchp	V
AbilityMic	lin	AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) app with communication boards, OBF/OBZ import-export, TTS synthesis and on-device word prediction.	hybrid	commercial-l		Proprietary	V
Accerciser	lin	GNOME's interactive AT-SPI tree explorer - the tool you use to see whether an app actually exposes its text and selection to the accessibility bus.	local-only	?		BSD-3-Clause	L
access-irc	lin	"Accessible IRC client with GTK3 and screen reader support." [vendor, AUR description]	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
accessibility-inspector (KDE)	lin	KDE tool that inspects an application's accessibility tree - the KDE counterpart to Accerciser / aviewer.	local-only	active	8	GPL	M
Accessible Linux distributions (Vinux, Accessible Coconut, Slint	lin	Linux distributions preconfigured so Orca, speech-dispatcher, BRLTTY and a working voice are running from first boot, including during installation.	local-only	?		varies (GPL-fa	L
ADRIANE (Knoppix Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Netw	lin	Talking Knoppix desktop environment named by a partially-sighted r/linux commenter as their long-time choice ('I have used ADRIENE, as my go-to-distro	local-only	active		GPL (Knoppix)	L
Alyssum (icosane)	lin/win	'Translate text, speech, books, and documents fully offline with OCR and Whisper.'	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
AT-SPI a11y-manager + Mutter/KWin accessibility keyboard API	lin	The plumbing that restored global screen-reader hotkeys on Wayland: the compositor hands keyboard events only to a privileged accessibility client, ch	local-only	?		LGPL-2.1 (AT-S	M
at-spi-dbus	lin	'The AT-SPI D-Bus project aims to define D-Bus interfaces used to provide accessibility information to assistive technologies' — the Launchpad-era des	local-only	archived		unknown	V
AT-SPI2 (at-spi2-core)	lin/legacy	The Linux accessibility bus itself: the D-Bus protocol and registry through which toolkits expose their widget trees and screen readers read them.	local-only	?	30	LGPL-2.1	M
atk (stefan11111)	lin	'Minimal implementation of Gnome Accessibility Toolkit'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
atspi (Rust crate, odilia-app)	lin	A pure-Rust implementation of the AT-SPI protocol, written for Odilia but usable by any Rust program that wants to read the Linux accessibility tree.	local-only	active	59	Apache-2.0	M
atspi2-rs (wizzwizz4)	lin	Rust AT-SPI2 bindings whose own description warns 'Don't use this yet.'	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	M
audiobook-converter (Launchpad)	lin	'An easy usable application which converts from text formats to mp3 format audio books.'	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
Bifrost (Stormux)	lin	'A vibe coded, fully screen reader accessible fediverse client.'	unknown	unknown	0	unknown	L
Bookstorm	lin	'Accessible book reader' from the Stormux Gitea instance.	unknown	unknown	0	unknown	L
Cerva	lin	Python/GtkBuilder front-end to Festival inspired by the program 'Fala', with Unicode support and save-speech-to-file.	local-only	dormant		GPL-3 (Launchp	V
cicero	lin	Debian accessibility package at version 0.7.2-4, maintained under the a11y-team group on Salsa; a small self-voicing text tool for blind users.	local-only	dormant		unknown	L
Clipboard (Slackadays/Clipboard)	lin/mac/win/legacy	A cross-platform clipboard manager operated entirely from the command line, described by its author as a smart clipboard manager [vendor].	local-only	active	5	GPL-3.0	L
clipboard-watcher (dethos)	lin	Tool that reports which applications are reading the clipboard - relevant as a way to observe whether a selection reader is polling.	local-only	dormant	50	MIT	M
clipocr (jonnyprouty)	lin	'A simple shell script for performing ocr on image displayed on a screen, but not as selectable text.'	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
crengine-ng / CoolReader-NG	lin/win/and	'crengine-ng is cross-platform library designed to implement text viewers and e-book readers' — the maintained continuation of the CoolReader engine,	local-only	unknown	13	unknown	V
DAISY Player	lin	'Daisy Player for Blinds' — ncurses TUI player for DAISY 2 and 3 talking-book files, on SourceForge and packaged by Debian's a11y-team.	local-only	unknown		unknown (no SF	V
Debian a11y-team roster (salsa.debian.org/a11y-team)	lin	A single Salsa group holding packaging for ~70 Linux accessibility components, including several with no GitHub presence: cicero, eflite, emacspeak-ss	local-only	active		per-package	M
Desktop custom-shortcut pipe pitfall - wrap in bash -c '...'	lin	Accepted answer: GNOME/KDE custom-shortcut commands are not run through a shell, so a pipeline like xsel --clipboard | festival --tts silently does	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
docTR	lin/win/mac	Deep-learning document text recognition library (detection + recognition), TensorFlow/PyTorch.	local-only	?	6	Apache-2.0	M
dpScreenOCR	lin/win	Cross-platform Tesseract screen OCR with a configurable global hotkey; besides clipboard and history it has a 'Run executable' action that passes the	local-only	?	295	Zlib	M
e2spd (mglambda)	lin	Low-latency bridge between Emacspeak and the Linux Speech Dispatcher architecture.	local-only	?	1	GPL-2.0	M
EasyOCR	lin/win/mac	Ready-to-use OCR for 80+ languages; one of the selectable backends in Translumo and wolfmanstout/screen-ocr.	local-only	?	30	Apache-2.0	M
eBook-speaker	lin	Jos Lemmens' tool to 'Read aloud eBooks, text documents or scanned documents using a software speech-synthesizer'; the same author's DAISY Player is p	local-only	unknown		LGPL-2.1 / LGP	V
edbrowse	lin	Command-line editor/browser designed for blind users (Debian 3.8.12-1), packaged under the Salsa a11y-team.	local-only	active		GPL (not re-ve	V
Elevado	lin	GNOME 'Accessibility inspector' (10 stars on the feaneron copy, with a Rust variant at qwery/elevado-rust) — a modern successor to Accerciser for brow	local-only	unknown	10	unknown	V
emacs-nano-tts-minor-mode	lin	Emacs minor mode described as an 'Accessibility tool that reads marked text', from the clipboard-speaker author.	local-only	dormant	0	unknown	V
Emacspeak (tvraman/emacspeak)	lin/mac/legacy	The Complete Audio Desktop: a full speech-output subsystem for Emacs that speaks everything Emacs displays, with audio formatting and voice-lock.	local-only	?	282	none declared	M
Enamy TTS (enamy-tts, enamy-tts-rs, enamy-api, enamy-plaintalk-a	lin	C++/Slint on-screen caption overlay (a Rust version is marked DEPRECATED) whose main.cpp posts typed text to a remote EnAmy /api/EnAmy/CreateVoice end	cloud-API	dormant	0	LICENSE file p	M
espeaker (taylordotfish)	lin	'IRC text-to-speech using espeak'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
espeakup	lin	A lightweight connector daemon that lets the in-kernel Speakup console screen reader drive eSpeak/eSpeak NG as its software synthesizer.	local-only	?	1	GPL-3.0	M
espeakup-rs (herman_rimm)	lin	Rust reimplementation of espeakup (the Speakup-to-eSpeak connector), with an accompanying PKGBUILD repo.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
explique.nvim (mickaelfree)	lin/mac/win	Neovim plugin that explains the selected text aloud using an AI model plus local TTS.	hybrid	active	0	none declared	V
fenrir (ky1e GitLab copy)	lin	GitLab copy of the Fenrir TTY screen reader alongside the chrys87 original — noted only as a forge-location fact about an already-catalogued project.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	D
festcat	lin	'Festcat aims to provide high quality Catalan voices to Festival Speech System' — voice-data supply on Launchpad.	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
FreeSpeak-AAC (Linux and Android)	lin/and	'FreeSpeak-AAC is intended to be a FREE and Open Source alternative to the existing paid AAC software', with separate Linux and Android repos.	unknown	unknown	0	unknown	L
Frog	lin	GNOME app that extracts text from any image, screen area, video frame or QR code; no speech output found in the README.	local-only	?	897	MIT	M
Frog	lin	"Extract text from images" [vendor] — screen-region and image OCR that puts the result on the clipboard.	local-only	active		MIT	V
gImageReader	lin	"A graphical (gtk) frontend to tesseract-ocr" [vendor].	local-only	active		GPL-3.0+	V
Glate	lin	"Translate text and generate speech audio on Linux desktop" [vendor] — translation front-end with a speech-output side.	cloud-API	active		proprietary (L	V
gnome-braille (GNOME Archive)	lin	Archived GNOME braille library, sibling of gnome-speech.	local-only	archived	0	unknown	L
gnome-speech (GNOME Archive)	lin	Archived GNOME 2 speech abstraction: 'to provide a simple general API for producing text-to-speech output', version 0.4.25, the layer Gnopernicus and	local-only	archived	0	LGPL (GNOME-er	M
gspeech (GNOME Archive)	lin	Archived 'gtk module to provide speech output for gtk programs' — you load it into any GTK program and it speaks; ships a simple command server and a	local-only	archived	0	unknown	M
gtk-openmary	lin	'A front-end for the MARY Java TTS (text-to-speech) engine', modelled on eSpeak's GUI.	local-only	dormant		unknown	V
ha-rhvoice	lin	Home Assistant integration exposing RHVoice as a local TTS provider.	local-only	?	54	MIT	M
HiFi-GAN	lin	The reference neural vocoder used as the final stage in a large share of TTS systems.	local-only	?	2	MIT	M
hyacinthia (icosane)	lin/win	'Simple graphical front-end for F5-TTS'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
hypra-epub-reader	lin	Browser-based EPUB reader written for Hachette/Hatier schoolbooks because publisher apps lack Linux support; README states it aims for 'at least basic	local-only	active	0	unknown	M
install-spd-piper (alexkuz gist)	lin	One-line shell installer that registers Piper as a Speech Dispatcher module and auto-downloads voices, so any Linux screen reader can use it.	local-only	?		gist, unstated	M
irssi-autospeak (jticket, Stormux Gitea)	lin	'Autospeak For Irssi' — speaks IRC activity from inside the irssi terminal client.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
iTTS.py / iTTS (KOLANICH)	lin	Jupyter kernel that speaks the text of a cell via speech-dispatcher; a GitLab copy exists at gitlab.com/KOLANICH/iTTS.	local-only	dormant	0	unknown (no RE	V
Jormungandr	lin	GitLab repository holding a design document for a client/server Linux screen reader - a README enumerating the message verbs each component (Speech, I	unknown	dormant	0	A LICENSE file	L
Jovie (KDE Text-to-Speech daemon)	lin	KDE's system-tray text-to-speech daemon and subsystem (successor to KTTSD), intended as the standard speech-output layer for KDE applications; effecti	local-only	discontinued	9	GPL (KDE)	M
Kate "Speak Text" via Qt Speech	lin	Accepted 2025-2026 answer to a writer who wanted chapter-at-a-time readback: paste into Kate and use its Qt Speech text-to-speech, same speechd plugin	local-only	active		LGPL/GPL (KDE)	M
KDE Connect	lin/win/mac/and/legacy	'Multi-platform app that allows your devices to communicate' [vendor] — includes a clipboard-sync plugin between paired devices on the same network.	local-only	active	3	null on the Gi	L
kde-notify-text2speech (boospy)	lin	German-language KDE Plasma sound theme that speaks system/program notifications instead of playing tones.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
kde-tts-input-method (davidedmundson)	lin	KDE repository named kde-tts-input-method with no description and no README — existence confirmed, purpose not.	unknown	dormant	0	unknown	L
keyd (rvaiya)	lin	Linux key-remapping daemon operating at the evdev layer, so it applies in X11, Wayland and the console alike; can execute commands on a chord.	local-only	active	5827	MIT	M
KMag (KDE screen magnifier)	lin	KDE's 'Screen magnifier', living in the invent.kde.org accessibility group with many personal forks.	local-only	unknown	4	unknown	V
KMouth (KDE)	lin	KDE's type-and-say front end for speech synthesizers — a speech-generating utility for people who cannot speak, still actively maintained.	local-only	active	11	GPL (KDE)	M
kokoro-debian-tts / piper-speechd / sd-edge-tts / OneNoted speak	lin	Speech Dispatcher modules that plug modern neural engines (Piper, Kokoro, Edge, Qwen3-TTS) into the Linux speech stack.	hybrid	dormant	3	AGPL-3.0 / GPL	M
lemonade	lin/mac/win	'Lemonade is a remote utility tool. (copy, paste and open browser) over TCP.' [vendor] — a daemon on the desktop plus a CLI on the remote box, so a he	local-only	dormant	727	MIT	M
libbraille (Savannah)	lin	Savannah-hosted 'Braille library' for driving refreshable braille displays.	local-only	dormant		unknown	V
libNotify-Speech-Dispatcher	lin	'Speaks messages from libNotify, caught by DBus, through speech-dispatcher' — desktop notifications read aloud.	local-only	dormant		GPL-3 (Launchp	V
libqaccessibilityclient (KDE)	lin	KDE's Qt-flavoured AT-SPI client helper library - the Qt-side counterpart to pyatspi for programs that need to read the Linux accessibility tree.	local-only	?	7	LGPL (KDE conv	M
libttstd and speakcid (Savannah)	lin	Two Savannah non-GNU projects surfaced by a 'tts' software search: libttstd (a TTS daemon library, by name) and speakcid (a caller-ID speaker, by name	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
Lios (Linux Intelligent OCR Solution)	lin	OCR suite for Tesseract and Cuneiform aimed at visually impaired users; scans or imports images and can read the recognised text aloud.	local-only	dormant			L
Luwrain	lin/win	A Java 'accessible environment' rather than a screen reader: instead of reading a graphical desktop, it replaces the desktop with an entirely non-visu	local-only	?	24	GPL-3.0	M
magnify (amiloradovsky) and gnome-swift-screen-magnifier (Amonit	lin	Two GitLab-only screen magnifiers: 'Tiny screen magnifier for X11' and a GNOME Shell magnifier.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Manga_Gaze	lin/win	'A Python app to make manga accessible: Turn manga into words' — OCR of manga pages plus translation.	unknown	unknown	0	unknown	L
Max TTS	lin	GPL-3 'text output application' providing enlarged on-screen text output plus speech output, using MARY TTS as its backend with the stated intent that	local-only	dormant		GPL-3.0 (Launc	V
mono-a11y	lin	'Enables Winforms and Silverlight applications to be fully accessible on Linux, and allows Assistive Technologies' to reach them — the Mono AT-SPI bri	local-only	dormant		unknown	V
Neural-Voices-Speech-Dispatcher	lin	Use Microsoft Azure voices with your Linux screen reader.	cloud-API	?	0	none declared	M
Newton (Wayland-native accessibility architecture)	lin	A proposed replacement for AT-SPI on modern free desktops, by AccessKit's author: push the accessibility tree through Wayland/compositor channels inst	local-only	?	,	open source (A	L
NoComprendo	lin	Qt6 Linux tool by Bruno Anselme that is a voice-command, dictation and text-to-speech utility: Vosk speech recognition, user-recorded commands, automa	local-only	dormant	0	unknown	M
NormCap	lin	"Capture text from any screen area" [vendor] — OCR screen-capture tool.	local-only	active	2,676	GPL-3.0-or-lat	V
nvda2speechd	lin/win	Bridge exposing NVDA-style speech output to speech-dispatcher, packaged on Salsa (also surfaced by GitLab.com search).	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
OCR Grab	lin	Lightweight C/GTK3 + Tesseract X11 utility: interactively select a screen region (with an adjustment mode), OCR it, and copy to the clipboard with an	local-only	?		not verified	V
OCRFeeder	lin	"The complete OCR suite" [vendor] — document OCR with layout analysis.	local-only	active		GPL-3.0+	V
ocrit2tts	lin	'Script to screenshot + OCR webpages that use arrow keys to change pages. Useful for the following process: Screenshot -> OCR -> Text -> Speech'.	unknown	dormant	0	unknown	V
ocrizer (Hypra)	lin	GPL-3 OCR tool ('ocrize') from Hypra, the French company that packages an accessible MATE-based Debian for blind users; developed on salsa.debian.org,	local-only	active	0	GPL-3.0-or-lat	M
OCRmyPDF	lin/mac/win	Adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDFs so they become searchable and selectable.	local-only	?	34	MPL-2.0	M
Okular "Speak Text" on a PDF selection (+ the qtspeech-speechd-p	lin	Okular reads a right-click text selection aloud through Qt Speech -> Speech Dispatcher, but does nothing until qtspeech5-speechd-plugin (Qt5) or qt6-s	local-only	active		GPL-2.0-or-lat	M
Open SAPI (uSpeak)	lin	Launchpad project aiming 'to bring the Microsoft Speech Application Programming Interface into use under open source projects', first goal being SAPI	local-only	dormant		OSL-3.0 (Launc	V
Orca	lin	The GNOME screen reader for Linux; it reads the AT-SPI accessibility tree and speaks through speech-dispatcher, and has no OCR of its own — OCRDesktop	local-only	?		LGPL	M
Orca (Codeberg copy, WaylandNewton/orca)	lin	A Codeberg-hosted copy of GNOME Orca carrying the upstream description ('Screen reader for graphical applications that use the atspi protocol, via spe	local-only	unknown	0	LGPL (upstream	D
orca-controller / Orca-Controller-Client / Remora	lin	Go and Python clients that drive the Orca screen reader over D-Bus or named pipes, plus Remora, a companion app for Orca.	local-only	?	1	AGPL-3.0	M
orca-intro-guide	lin	New-user guide for the Orca screen reader on Linux.	local-only	?	13	none declared	M
orca-remote	lin	Bidirectional bridge letting Orca on Linux control, and be controlled by, NVDA Remote-compatible peers over the NVDA Remote v2 protocol — speech, brai	hybrid	?	4	LGPL-2.1	M
orcatutor / orca-teacher	lin	Two Launchpad projects teaching Orca use: 'A basic application to guide a user through the user interface using the orca screen reader' and 'An educat	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
osc (theimpostor/osc)	lin/mac/win	'Access the system clipboard from anywhere using the ANSI OSC52 sequence' [vendor] — a single binary that reads stdin and emits the OSC 52 write seque	local-only	active	145	MIT	M
PaddleOCR	lin/win/mac	Large OCR toolkit for documents and images, 100+ languages, oriented toward turning PDFs/images into structured data.	local-only	?	87	Apache-2.0	M
ParallelWaveGAN	lin	Parallel WaveGAN / MelGAN / HiFi-GAN vocoder implementations with recipes.	local-only	?	1	MIT	M
Pied	lin	Installs and configures the Piper neural TTS engine to work with Speech Dispatcher, then downloads and manages voices.	local-only	active		GPL-3.0+	V
piper-tts-firefox-reader-mode	lin	Guide to adding Piper neural voices to Firefox Reader Mode via Speech Dispatcher on Ubuntu 24.04.	local-only	?	0	none declared	M
piper-tts.el (Sshigeru)	lin/mac	Emacs package described as 'Run TTS on Emacs regions with piper-tts'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
PipeWire network audio (module-rtp-sink / module-rtp-source, pip	lin	PipeWire's own module reference: 'The rtp-sink module creates a PipeWire sink that sends audio RTP packets' with source.ip/destination.ip options and	local-only	active		MIT (PipeWire)	V
polyglot-for-orca	lin	Orca add-on: automatic language switching, emoji reading and Unicode character pronunciation.	local-only	?	1	none declared	M
PulseAudio network audio (module-native-protocol-tcp, module-tun	lin/legacy	freedesktop's PulseAudio network documentation: set PULSE_SERVER to a remote host, or load module-tunnel-sink, and audio produced on one machine plays	local-only	active		LGPL-2.1+ (Pul	M
pyatspi2 (GNOME)	lin	Python client bindings for AT-SPI2; the Text interface is where GetTextSelection / get_text_at_offset live, which is the Linux non-destructive selecti	local-only	active	25	LGPL-2.1	M
pyatspitest (Hypra)	lin	'Various tools to access and debug AT-SPI2 (through pyatspi)'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
qml-speechd	lin	'QML API bindings for the speech-dispatcher text to speech server' — lets Qt/QML apps (including mobile shells) speak through speechd.	local-only	dormant		LGPL-3 (Launch	V
qtatspi (KDE)	lin	Qt accessibility bridge plugin that exported Qt widgets onto AT-SPI before the bridge moved into Qt itself.	local-only	archived	7	LGPL	M
RapidOCR	lin/win/mac	ONNX Runtime / OpenVINO / MNN packaging of PaddleOCR models across many languages and bindings — the usual choice when an app wants offline OCR withou	local-only	?	7	Apache-2.0	M
readaloud (SourceForge)	lin	'Reading program for plain text books. Readaloud is an aide for learning reading also. It helps by displaying text in large fonts and speaking a word	local-only	unknown		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
repy	lin/mac/win	Rust terminal EPUB reader inspired by epy, 10 stars: it parses a book file and reads it inside its own TUI, toggling TTS with !, chunking sentence b	hybrid	active	10	none declared	M
retro-tts-pack	lin	Retro speech synthesizers packaged for Speech Dispatcher and Orca on Linux.	local-only	?	2	none declared	M
retro-tts-pack / Apple-Eloquence-ELF / ViaVoice-SPD	lin	Projects that bring classic screen-reader voices (Eloquence, ViaVoice, retro synths) to Linux Speech Dispatcher and Orca.	local-only	?	16	other / GPL-2.	M
RHVoice-English fixes (Stormux)	lin	'English fixes for RHVoice' — a voice-data patch set living only on the Stormux Gitea.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Roc Toolkit	lin/mac/and	'Real-time audio streaming over the network' [vendor] — a toolkit and set of tools for sending audio between machines with loss recovery and latency c	local-only	active	1	MPL-2.0	M
SAK (Speecher Assistive Kit)	lin/win/mac	Pascal library whose description says 'With sak, your application becomes assistive directly, without changing anything in your code' — bundles eSpeak	local-only	dormant	0	split: /sak pe	M
screengrab-ocr (bhvsh) and screenshot-ocr-linux (emonbhuiyan)	lin	Two further GitLab-only screenshot-OCR utilities: 'A Python application that captures screenshots and performs optical character recognition (OCR) on	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
sd-piper	lin	Speech Dispatcher driver implementing Piper neural voices for the Orca screen reader.	local-only	?	1	GPL-3.0	M
seed-tts-eval	lin	ByteDance's TTS evaluation benchmark and test sets.	local-only	?	1	none declared	M
selenium-webdriver-at-spi (KDE)	lin	'Selenium/Appium WebDriver implementation based on AT-SPI Accessibility' — drives Linux desktop apps through the same accessibility tree a selection r	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
selenium-webdriver-at-spi (KDE)	lin	A WebDriver implementation backed by AT-SPI, used to drive and assert on KDE apps through the accessibility tree.	local-only	active	7	GPL	M
sight-free-talon	lin/mac/win	Bridges the Talon voice-control engine to screen readers, TTS and braille, so voice commands can trigger reading actions.	local-only	?	24	GPL-3.0	M
Silero-TTS-Service	lin/legacy	Silero TTS backend service for Home Assistant / Rhasspy.	local-only	?	60	MIT	M
simple-orca-plugin-system (chrys87)	lin	'a simple but powerfull pluginsystem for the orca screenreader', from the Fenrir/Jormungandr author.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Snapcast	lin/mac/and/legacy	'Synchronous multiroom audio player' [vendor] — a server/client pair that distributes an audio stream to multiple networked clients in sync.	local-only	active	7	GPL-3.0	M
sonarmacs	lin	'Speech-dispatcher enabled Emacs' — an Emacs speech layer wired to speech-dispatcher rather than to Emacspeak's own servers.	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
sonic / libsonic	lin/and	Library and CLI to speed up or slow down speech without pitch distortion — the playback-rate layer behind many screen readers; also on Launchpad as 's	local-only	unknown		Apache-2.0 (up	V
speakerd	lin	Python reimplementation of Speech Dispatcher whose README states 'The purpose is not to replace the original program but to use it for testing or POC'	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-3.0 (READM	M
Speech Dispatcher (speechd)	lin/legacy	The Linux speech-output middleware layer: a common device-independent API that multiplexes many client applications onto pluggable synthesis modules.	local-only	?		GPL	M
Speech Dispatcher (speechd)	lin/legacy	The Linux speech broker: one stable protocol (SSIP) in front of many synthesis engines, with spd-say as a general text-to-speech CLI.	local-only	?	329	GPL-2.0 (daemo	M
Speech Dispatcher upstream on Savannah (speechd)	lin	The Savannah group registration for speechd — a forge-location fact about an already-catalogued project: its canonical home has historically been free	local-only	active		GPL/LGPL	M
Speech Viewer / speechd-up / Emacspeak bridges	lin	Debug and integration utilities around Speech Dispatcher — a window that displays what would be spoken, a Speakup console-reader bridge, and Emacs spe	local-only	?	0	BSD-2-Clause /	L
speech-dispatcher-rs / speech-dispatcher-sys (ndarilek and forks	lin	Rust bindings to speech-dispatcher, with GitLab copies under ndarilek, TTWNO, mcb2003, Caellian, cpu and MallocVoidstar.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
speechd-java	lin	The official Java client library for Speech Dispatcher, developed separately from the main speechd tree.	local-only	?	3	not reported b	M
speechd-up	lin	The other Speakup connector: bridges the Speakup kernel screen reader to Speech Dispatcher, so the console reader can use any speechd output module.	local-only	?		GPL-2.0-or-lat	L
Spiel / libspiel	lin	A newer GNOME-adjacent speech framework: a Web-Speech-API-shaped client library over D-Bus speech providers, integrated with GStreamer - positioned as	local-only	?	53	LGPL-2.1	M
SRAL (Screen Reader Abstraction Library)	lin	Library that abstracts over screen readers and speech engines so an application can speak through whatever the user is running.	local-only	archived	21	MIT	V
ssip-client (Rust) — TTWNO and lp-accessibility copies	lin	'Speech Dispatcher SSIP client library in rust' — the client library under the Odilia/Rust Linux-a11y line, present on GitLab under both TTWNO (Tait H	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
Stormux	lin	Self-hosted-Gitea Arch-based accessible Linux distribution described as 'The continuation of the F123Light project'; the same forge hosts ~50 blind-ac	local-only	active	0	unknown	V
Subtitle Reader (Hackaday project)	lin	Hobby project that reads TV subtitles off the screen by OCR and speaks them aloud, for children and visually impaired viewers.	local-only	?		not verified	L
Surya	lin/win/mac	OCR with layout analysis, reading order and table recognition in 90+ languages.	local-only	?	21	Apache-2.0	M
tacotron (keithito)	lin	TensorFlow Tacotron with pretrained models; source of the widely reused text-normalization code.	local-only	?	3	MIT	M
Tacotron 2 (NVIDIA)	lin	PyTorch Tacotron 2 with faster-than-realtime inference.	local-only	?	5	BSD-3-Clause	M
Tacotron-2 (Rayhane)	lin	TensorFlow Tacotron-2 implementation.	local-only	?	2	MIT	M
Talking DOSBox	lin	"A talking dosbox with screen reader." [vendor, AUR description] — DOSBox fork that speaks its emulated screen.	local-only	dormant		unknown	L
Tesseract OCR	lin/win/mac	A high-adoption open-source OCR engine; hand it an image, it returns text. Used by dpScreenOCR, NormCap, Capture2Text, TextSnatcher, Frog, gImageReade	local-only	?	76	Apache-2.0	M
Text Grabber (GNOME Shell extension)	lin	OCR grab extension; listing carries a maintainer-wanted notice. [vendor]	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
text-to-speech-ubuntu	lin	Minimal Ubuntu selection reader: select text with the mouse, press a key, and xsel piped to espeak reads it — no OCR.	local-only	?	29	none declared	M
TextSnatcher	lin	"Snatch Text with just a Drag" [vendor] — drag a region, get its text.	local-only	active		GPL-3.0-or-lat	V
tolk-spd-proxy	lin	A drop-in tolk.dll replacement for Wine prefixes that forwards screen-reader speech calls (mostly from audio games) to speech-dispatcher on the Linux	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
tolk2spd	lin	Bridge exposing the Windows Tolk screen-reader API on top of Linux Speech Dispatcher.	local-only	?	0	0BSD	M
triggerhappy (wertarbyte)	lin	Lightweight hotkey daemon that reads evdev directly, so it works with no X server at all. Pre-dates Wayland but is the same evdev-level answer as hkd.	local-only	dormant	296	GPL-2.0	M
vimspeak	lin/mac/win	Vim plugin connecting vim to espeak: it overrides s and S so that s{motion} reads the implicated text aloud (e.g. s} reads the paragraph).	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
WaveGlow	lin	Flow-based vocoder from NVIDIA.	local-only	?	2	BSD-3-Clause	M
wavenet_vocoder	lin	WaveNet vocoder in PyTorch.	local-only	?	2	NOASSERTION	M
waynotify	lin	An accessible notification daemon for Wayland that routes desktop notifications through AT-SPI so a screen reader announces them.	local-only	?	3	MIT	M
wl-clipboard / wl-clipboard-rs	lin	The Wayland copy/paste utilities — wl-paste --primary is the Wayland equivalent of xsel/xclip and is the acquisition primitive every Wayland sel	local-only	active	2397	GPL-3.0	M
wlr-data-control / ext-data-control Wayland protocols	lin	The privileged Wayland protocol extensions that let a non-focused client read the clipboard and PRIMARY selection at all; ext-data-control is the upst	local-only	active		MIT	L
xctts	lin	X-Chat script using eSpeak to give each IRC user a distinct voice by varying espeak parameters, so users can be told apart while doing something else.	local-only	dormant		GPL-3 (Launchp	V
xdg-desktop-portal (frontend)	lin	The D-Bus service that front-ends every portal interface (Screenshot, ScreenCast, GlobalShortcuts, RemoteDesktop, InputCapture) and routes each call t	os-native	active	819	LGPL-2.1	M
xdg-desktop-portal Screenshot / ScreenCast interfaces	lin	The sandboxed D-Bus route by which a Wayland application may capture the screen at all — the OCR-reader equivalent of the clipboard problem, and the r	local-only	?		LGPL-2.1	L
ABBYY FineReader	win/mac	Long-established commercial OCR and PDF conversion suite; converts scans and images into editable/searchable text with high accuracy.	local-only	?		proprietary, p	V
access-bridge-explorer (google)	win	Explorer for the accessibility tree of Java Access Bridge-enabled applications - the separate accessibility stack Java desktop apps use on Windows.	local-only	dormant	131	Apache-2.0	M
Accessibility Insights for Windows	win	Microsoft's UIA tree inspector and automated-check tool for Windows apps - the Windows counterpart to Accerciser.	local-only	?	536	MIT (repo repo	M
AccessibleRunner / CommandRunner	win	Runs console commands and presents their output in a screen-reader-friendly window; a Python version and a C# version by the same author.	local-only	?	0	MIT	M
AccessKit	win/mac/lin/and	Cross-platform accessibility infrastructure for UI toolkits: one tree model that AccessKit projects onto Windows UIA, macOS AX, and Linux AT-SPI.	local-only	active	1	BSD-3-Clause (	M
accesskit-python	win/mac/lin	Python bindings for AccessKit.	local-only	active	6	BSD-3-Clause	M
ADELE-TEAM	win	French free reading/writing assistant for DYS profiles: vocalised reading with follow-along, rapid navigation, highlighter-style marking, passage extr	local-only	unknown		free	V
adispeak / adispeak-2	win	'Solution to make AdiIRC interface with screen readers' — two Codeberg repos from the same author.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Adobe Acrobat Reader — Read Out Loud (built-in)	win/mac	Acrobat Reader's View > Read Out Loud reads a clicked paragraph or from the cursor to end of document, using the OS voices.	os-native	?		Proprietary (A	L
AI Text Tools (Netropolitan)	win	'AI-powered text transformation for Windows. Select text anywhere, press a hotkey, and transform it using OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or	hybrid	active	3	not read	V
AOK application suite — MyEdit Neo / MyWord7 / MyBook Neo / MyNe	win	The application layer 高知システム開発 ships around PC-Talker: a voice text editor (MyEdit Neo), voice word processor (MyWord7), barrier-free reading app (MyB	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary (N	M
arboard (1Password)	win/mac/lin	Rust clipboard crate maintained by 1Password; the crate many Tauri/Rust readers use to read text after a simulated copy.	local-only	active	959	Apache-2.0 / M	M
ARIA-AT (Assistive Technology ARIA Experience Assessment)	win/mac	W3C community-group test suite measuring how JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver actually behave on ARIA patterns - the closest thing to a neutral capability com	local-only	?	181	W3C document a	M
AT Driver (W3C aria-at-automation)	win/mac	A draft protocol for introspecting and remote-controlling assistive technology over a bidirectional channel - a WebDriver-shaped standard for screen r	local-only	?		W3C / communit	M
AT Guys	win	US assistive-tech reseller that was the retail front for the Code Factory Eloquence + Vocalizer NVDA bundle.	unknown	unknown		n/a (reseller)	L
AutoHotkey non-clipboard selection capture via `ControlGet, Sele	win	Stack Overflow answer showing the only Windows route that avoids the clipboard entirely - it works only when the focused control matches Edit\d+, with	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
aviewer (ThePacielloGroup)	win	Inspector that dumps what MSAA, IAccessible2, UI Automation, ARIA and the HTML DOM each expose for a given Windows control - the tool that answers 'do	local-only	dormant	163	none	M
Blio (KNFB Reading Technology / Ray Kurzweil, with Baker & Taylo	win/and/ios	Kurzweil's colour, layout-preserving ebook platform launched in 2010 with text-to-speech using downloadable 'Samantha' and 'Tom' voices; its distribut	hybrid	discontinued		proprietary, f	M
Brazilian Portuguese GitHub reader cluster: vinimostaco/incipit	win/mac/lin/web	Small Portuguese-described projects: a Tauri+Python desktop app that reads PDFs, EPUBs and text aloud (incipit), a text reader with voice selection, a	local-only	unknown	0	mixed	L
calibre E-book viewer Read aloud (built-in)	win/mac/lin/legacy	calibre's bundled e-book viewer reads the open book aloud on Ctrl+S, highlighting the current word or sentence, using the Piper neural engine locally	local-only	?	22	GPL-3.0 (calib	M
CaptiOCR	win	Real-time screen text extraction: pick a rectangular region, and it repeatedly screenshots and Tesseract-OCRs it, stitching the text into a continuous	local-only	?	19	MIT	M
Chatterb0x	win	Small Python tray utility that fronts Chatterbox TTS.	local-only	?	3	MIT	L
chrome-extension-speak-selection (belcrod5) / obsidian--speak-se	win/mac/lin	Three further single-surface 'speak selection' implementations — a Chrome extension, an Obsidian plugin, and a JS selection-TTS project.	unknown	?	0	unspecified	L
Clavier+ (gryder.org)	win	French global-hotkey utility: launch a program or type text from a key combination, described as a single EXE under 200 KB with no registry storage an	local-only	active		open source	M
clipboard (CrossCopy)	win/mac/lin	Clipboard API with text and image read/write/watch for macOS, Windows and Linux.	local-only	active	25	MIT	M
Clipboard TTS (clipboardtts.com)	win	Commercial clipboard-to-speech desktop product; I reached only the download page, so capability claims beyond 'reads the clipboard' are unverified.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
clipboard-rs (ChurchTao)	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform Rust clipboard API covering text, image, rich text, HTML, files and change monitoring.	local-only	active	176	Apache-2.0	M
clipboard_listener (orderweaver)	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform Rust crate for listening to clipboard events.	local-only	dormant	2	none	M
clipboard_watcher (leanflutter)	win/mac/lin	Flutter plugin that raises an event when the system clipboard changes, on desktop targets.	local-only	dormant	60	MIT	M
clipboardEnhancement (NVDA add-on)	win	NVDA add-on extending clipboard handling and announcement, listed in the NVDA add-ons directory alongside Clipspeak and Autoclip.	local-only	?		unknown	L
ClipboardTTS (Daichi09)	win	Small Windows program that reads the current clipboard text through Microsoft SAPI; the README's stated use case is visual-novel text hookers that pus	os-native	dormant	4	Unlicense	M
ClipboardWatcher (DissectMalware)	win	Windows utility that monitors textual data pasted into the clipboard.	local-only	dormant	29	none	M
Clipspeak (NVDA add-on)	win	NVDA add-on that announces clipboard operations — cut, copy, paste, undo, redo — rather than reading the clipboard's contents.	local-only	?	7	check repo	M
copypasta (alacritty)	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform Rust system-clipboard crate maintained alongside Alacritty; exposes X11 PRIMARY as a distinct clipboard.	local-only	dormant	351	MIT / Apache-2	M
Descolada/UIA-v2	win	'UIAutomation library for AHK v2, based on thqby's UIA library' - the route by which an AutoHotkey selection reader can read text from a UIA TextPatte	local-only	active	460	MIT	M
Deskflow	win/mac/lin	'Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers.' [vendor] — the maintained successor line to Synergy/Barrier; clipboard sharing between	local-only	active	28	GPL-2.0	L
DirectShell	win	Posted to HN as "a new software primitive that replaces AI screenshot agents"; repo description is only "Because i could not Ressist".	unknown	?	21	NOASSERTION	L
document-reader-nvda-addon	win	NVDA add-on for reading multiple document formats accessibly.	local-only	?	3	GPL-2.0	M
Dolphin EasyReader (winget)	win	Accessible-library reader from Dolphin Computer Access, packaged for winget.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Dolphin GuideConnect	win	Windows product for people with sight loss that replaces the desktop with its own spoken, magnified menu environment for email, web, documents, scanni	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; so	V
DOSVOX (Instituto Tércio Pacitti / NCE, UFRJ)	win	Brazilian speech-based computing environment for blind users from UFRJ, running on Windows: a shell plus 80+ of its own speech-driven programs (editor	local-only	unknown		free distribut	M
DSpeech	win	Portable freeware Windows text-to-speech application (v1.74) that can capture and speak clipboard content, mix and juxtapose several SAPI voices, chan	os-native	unknown		Freeware (prop	M
Dual Voice for NVDA	win	'Dual Voice for NVDA is an open source speech driver for NVDA screen reader. This lets you use two separate voices for reading non-Latin and Latin lan	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
Dys-Vocal (Dyslogiciel)	win	French compensation software for dyslexia and dyspraxia: text formatting (coloured syllables, dyslexia fonts) plus modules for speech-synthesis readin	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	M
Easy Screen OCR	win/mac	Commercial screenshot-OCR utility that grabs a snapshot of the screen and extracts the text for editing.	cloud-API	?		proprietary, f	V
EdSharp	win	A self-voicing text editor distributed through the blind-user software scene, catalogued on Blind Help Project.	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
enigo (enigo-rs)	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform input simulation in Rust; the crate behind the simulated Ctrl+C in several Rust selection readers.	local-only	active	1761	MIT	M
eSearch	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform screenshot tool with offline OCR, screen translation, live-text and search — Windows, macOS and Linux.	local-only	?	6921	GPL-3.0	M
Firefox Reader View — Narrate (built-in)	win/mac/legacy	Firefox's Reader View has carried a Narrate (listen) button since 2016 that reads the distilled article using the platform speech synthesis.	os-native	?		MPL-2.0 (Firef	V
FlaUI	win	.NET wrapper over Windows UIA2/UIA3 for UI automation, including text-pattern access to selections.	local-only	?	3	MIT	M
Fluent Search — Screen Search with OCR	win	Windows launcher whose screen-search feature OCRs on-screen text so you can act on text that isn't selectable.	local-only	?		proprietary (f	V
global-hotkey (tauri-apps)	win/mac/lin	Rust crate providing global hotkeys for desktop apps on Windows, macOS and Linux; the crate Tauri-based readers use. Its Linux backend is X11-based, w	local-only	active	259	MIT / Apache-2	M
Hebrew NVDA packaging — תשר אופטיקה געש (TSR Gaash)	win	Israeli AT supplier that ships NVDA with its own selected add-ons and bundled Hebrew and English speech engines, stating the add-ons improve NVDA's be	local-only	commercial-l		GPL (NVDA) plu	M
huaiyinfeilong/xyOCR · yizilian-iren/HoverDict · zjmxczhy/foo_sp	win/mac	Three Chinese-described accessories: an OCR plug-in for NVDA (xyOCR), a macOS hover-to-look-up-and-speak tool (HoverDict), and a foobar2000 plug-in th	local-only	unknown	9	unknown	L
IBM Home Page Reader	win	Self-voicing web browser grown out of Chieko Asakawa's work at IBM Japan - it began as a Netscape extension and became an Internet Explorer plug-in, r	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	M
ICE Book Reader Professional	win	Russian e-book reader whose feature list includes read-aloud through SAPI 4.0 and SAPI 5.1, export of a book to MP3/WAV, splitting a book into several	local-only	dormant		freeware (Russ	M
Input Leap	win/mac/lin	'Open-source KVM software' [vendor] — the Barrier fork that preceded the Deskflow line; shares keyboard, mouse and clipboard across machines.	local-only	archived	8	NOASSERTION on	M
InputBot (obv-mikhail)	win/legacy	Rust library for global hotkeys and input simulation.	local-only	active	462	MIT	M
Interception (oblitum)	win	Windows kernel-level input interception driver and API; the layer AutoHotInterception and some Windows remappers sit on.	local-only	dormant	1957	Zlib	M
islambenmebarekdz-collab/Daftari	win	Arabic-first, NVDA-native Markdown note-taking app for Windows — an application built so an Arabic screen-reader user can work in it, rather than a re	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Israeli AT distributors: AccessMind (בראש נגיש) · Let's Talk טכנ	win/ios	Two Israeli assistive-technology vendors whose blindness product pages are built around JAWS for Hebrew-speaking users, one of them advertising a JAWS	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	M
IUIAutomationTextPattern::GetSelection (Windows UI Automation)	win	The Windows equivalent of the macOS AX call: 'Retrieves a collection of text ranges that represents the currently selected text in a text-based contro	os-native	active			M
java-access-bridge-wrapper (robocorp)	win	Python wrapper around the Java Access Bridge Windows DLL, giving programmatic reads of Java app UI text.	local-only	active	20	Apache-2.0	M
JAWS Tandem	win	A Freedom Scientific deployment and licensing page: adding paid 'remote authorization' to an existing JAWS or Fusion licence lets a copy of JAWS runni	hybrid	commercial-l		commercial; a	M
jintellitype (melloware)	win	Java API for registering Windows global hotkeys.	local-only	active	180	Apache-2.0	M
jkeymaster (tulskiy)	win/mac/legacy	Java global-hotkey registration via JNA for X11, Windows and macOS.	local-only	active	241	LGPL-3.0	M
kanata (jtroo)	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform keyboard remapper with layers, tap-hold and command execution; runs on Windows, macOS and Linux below the window system.	local-only	active	7722	LGPL-3.0	M
Korean JAWS (한국어 JAWS) — Siloam revision	win	The Korean revision of JAWS, produced by the same Siloam institute that developed 드림보이스; the institute's board hosts the installers and a troubleshoot	local-only	active		proprietary	M
Kurzweil 3000 / Kurzweil 1000 / OpenBook	win/mac/legacy	Long-established scan-and-read products for print-disabled users: OCR a scanned or imported document, then read it aloud with synchronized highlightin	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
MAGic	win	Screen magnification software with speech output for low-vision users (Freedom Scientific).	os-native	?		Proprietary, p	L
Microsoft Copilot Vision	win/ios/and	Windows/Edge feature where Copilot looks at the current screen or app window and answers questions about it in voice — an OS-level 'point at the scree	cloud-API	?		commercial/bun	V
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud	win/mac/lin	Browser-native read-aloud with natural voices and word highlighting for web pages, EPUB and PDFs — but only where a text layer already exists; an imag	hybrid	?		proprietary (b	V
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud (browser built-in)	win/mac/legacy/and/ios	Read Aloud is built into Edge itself: Ctrl+Shift+U (Cmd+Shift+U on macOS) reads the page, a PDF, or a selection, with a playback toolbar and neural vo	hybrid	?		Proprietary (b	V
Microsoft Immersive Reader	win/mac/web	Reading-mode surface across Edge, Word, OneNote and Teams that reflows the document and reads it aloud with line focus, syllable splitting and a dysle	hybrid	?		proprietary (f	V
Microsoft Office Read Aloud / Speak command	win/mac/web	Built into Word, Outlook, OneNote and PowerPoint: Read Aloud reads the document or the selection with word highlighting, and the older Speak command r	hybrid	?		proprietary (p	V
Microsoft Speech Platform voice packages (msspeech-tts-* on Choc	win	Per-voice Chocolatey packages that install Microsoft Speech Platform runtime voices (Helen, ZiraPro, Hazel, Heather, Hayley, Heera, Hanna, Herena, Hel	local-only	active		Microsoft EULA	M
mIRC With Speech (MWS)	win	mIRC script that pushes IRC messages, joins/parts and notices out through the user's existing screen reader (JAWS and NVDA supported) rather than mIRC	local-only	unknown		unknown (no SF	V
mircwithspeech (fudge333 GitLab)	win	'Accessible IRC mIRC script for screen reader users' — a GitLab copy of the SourceForge MWS line.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
MyStudyBar	win	CALL Scotland page describing MyStudyBar, a portable Windows launcher bar bundling literacy freeware that can be run from a USB pendrive, with two tex	local-only	dormant		Free of charge	M
Nattiq (Acapela Arabic voice supply for Dolphin)	win	Named on Dolphin's own voice-inventory page as the supplier and seller of the Acapela Arabic voice Leila — an example of regional voice sub-distributi	local-only	commercial-l		Voices bundled	L
NaturalReader	win/mac/legacy	Commercial TTS reader with free tier, spanning a desktop app, web app and Chrome extension, with OCR for scanned documents.	hybrid	?		Proprietary, f	L
NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter	win	A SAPI 5 engine shim that republishes Windows 11 Narrator natural voices, Edge Read Aloud online voices, and (with your key) Azure voices to any SAPI	hybrid	?	889	MIT	M
NHotkey (thomaslevesque)	win	Managed .NET library for global hotkeys in WinForms and WPF.	local-only	active	342	Apache-2.0	M
NoMachine NX clipboard (EnableClipboard server/client/none)	win/mac/lin/and/ios/web	NoMachine's own knowledge base states 'By default users can copy and paste from locale to the session and vice-versa', and documents EnableClipboard=s	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary (f	M
NVDA 'tesseractOCR' add-on (Rui Fontes)	win	NVDA add-on that OCRs a FILE rather than the screen: Windows+Control+R runs Tesseract over the image or PDF file currently selected, Windows+Control+W	local-only	active	14	GPL-2.0	M
NVDA Brasil (nvda.com.br)	win	Brazilian NVDA community portal distributing the official installer alongside curated add-ons; its download page was current for NVDA 2026.1.1 as of 2	local-only	active		GPL (NVDA)	M
NVDA Controller Client	win	NVDA's official external-process API: a DLL any program can call to make a running NVDA speak text or SSML, braille a message, cancel speech, or repor	local-only	?		Distributed wi	M
NVDA Controller Client (bindings cluster)	win	The NVDA-supplied DLL API that lets any third-party program push a string into NVDA's speech queue; found in this sweep as language bindings rather th	local-only	dormant	2		M
NVDA Remote Access (built-in)	win	NVDA's now-built-in remote feature: an NVDA on one machine speaks what an NVDA on another machine sees, mediated by a relay server - NVDA-to-NVDA, not	hybrid	?		GPL-2.0-or-lat	M
NVDA Remote Access add-on (NVDARemote)	win	NVDA add-on (v2.6) that connects two machines each already running NVDA, relaying keyboard and braille input to the controlled machine and its speech	hybrid	dormant	78	GPL-2.0	M
nvda-autohotkey (hi5)	win	Library letting AutoHotkey scripts send text to NVDA for speech and braille output.	local-only	?	4	LGPL-2.1	L
nvda-testing-driver	win	Build functional tests that drive the NVDA screen reader.	local-only	?	48	GPL-3.0	M
nvda2speechd	win/lin	Bridge letting Windows applications route speech through Linux's Speech Dispatcher.	local-only	dormant	12	GPL-3.0	L
Obsidian-pdf-read-aloud	win/mac/lin	Obsidian plugin that reads PDFs opened inside the vault using the browser Web Speech API: play/pause/stop, skip by a configurable number of sentences,	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Oculos	win/mac/lin	"If it's on the screen, it's an API" — exposes any desktop app's UI automation tree over REST and MCP, in Rust.	local-only	?	126	MIT	M
Parsec	win/mac/lin/and/web	Low-latency remote-desktop / game-streaming product; its public help centre was reachable but I could not locate a clipboard-behaviour or accessibilit	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary	L
peterrc87/TCA_Portapapeles · rayo-alcantar/KillProcess	win	Two Spanish-language NVDA add-ons: a clipboard add-on and one that ends the focused process. [lang: Spanish; English UI: no]	local-only	unknown	2	unknown	L
pipe2textbox	win	Pipes arbitrary command-line output into a read-only Windows textbox purely so a screen reader can read it - a one-trick bridge from stdout to accessi	local-only	?	13	MIT	M
Piper-Tray	win	Windows system-tray utility that drives Piper TTS.	local-only	?	33	none declared	L
POMXARK/SmartDictor · pegas365i4/voicing_text_in_cmd · ikopylov1	win	Three Russian-described hobby projects: recognition and voicing of text taken from the screen (SmartDictor), a self-described simplified Balabolka ana	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
PowerTalk	win	'PowerTalk automatically speaks Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. For presenters who find speaking difficult, audiences containing people with visua	os-native	unknown		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
Premier Literacy suite (Universal Reader, Scan and Read Pro, Tal	win/legacy	US literacy-software suite for dyslexic and low-vision users bundling a general reader, a scan-and-read tool, a talking word processor and a browser t	local-only	unknown		proprietary; c	L
Py TTS	win	'Py TTS is a text to speech (TTS) software which uses Microsoft's SAPI to convert text into spoken audio. You can listen as the program reads out the	os-native	dormant		GPL-3 (Launchp	V
pyia2 (illinois-dres-aitg)	win	Python interface to the MSAA and IAccessible2 interfaces - the accessibility API Firefox and LibreOffice expose on Windows, distinct from UIA.	local-only	dormant	10	none	M
PyScreenReader	win/mac/lin	"A cross-platform Python library that wraps native accessibility APIs to collect widget tree information on the screen" [vendor] — parses UI propertie	local-only	active		MIT	V
pyscrout	win	Python library that sends text to be spoken and shown in braille by a screen reader, positioned by its README as a maintained replacement for accessib	local-only	active	0	unknown	M
Python-UIAutomation-for-Windows (yinkaisheng)	win	Python 3 wrapper of Microsoft UIAutomation covering MFC, WinForms, WPF, Modern UI and more.	local-only	active	3547	Apache-2.0	M
pywinauto	win	Python GUI automation for Windows with a UIA backend - a practical way to script 'get the selected text out of the focused control' without writing a	local-only	active	6	BSD-3-Clause	M
QHotkey (Skycoder42)	win/mac/legacy	Global shortcut library for desktop Qt applications on Windows, macOS and X11. Qt-native; relevant to the KDE stack because Qt Speech-based readers ne	local-only	active	677	BSD-3-Clause	M
Qt Speech (QTextToSpeech)	win/mac/lin/and/ios	Qt's cross-platform TTS abstraction: one API that maps onto SAPI/WinRT on Windows, AVSpeechSynthesizer/NSSpeechSynthesizer on macOS, speech-dispatcher	local-only	active	39	LGPL-3.0 / GPL	M
Quicker (getquicker.net)	win	Chinese Windows action-launcher platform; its community forum carries a user request titled 建议增加划词朗读 (add select-and-read-aloud), placing it in the tr	local-only	active		proprietary (f	M
Quill (Community-Access)	win	Screen-reader-first writing, review and document-intelligence environment for Windows with guided diagnostics and format workflows.	unknown	?	42	MIT	M
RDAccess (Remote Desktop Accessibility for NVDA)	win	NVDA add-on that carries screen-reader output across a remote-desktop session, so the remote machine's accessibility information is spoken by the loca	local-only	?	15	GPL-2.0	M
rdev (Narsil)	win/mac/lin	Rust library to listen for and send keyboard/mouse events on macOS, Windows and Linux.	local-only	active	738	MIT	M
RDP clipboard redirection as a selection-acquisition route (meth	win/mac/lin	Over RDP the clipboard is shared between guest and host by default, so a copy-then-speak reader running on the LOCAL machine can read text selected in	local-only	?		n/a	D
Read Text Extension for LibreOffice / Apache OpenOffice (jimholg	win/mac/legacy	Office-suite extension that reads the SELECTION in Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress or Web Writer, or the clipboard contents, by handing the text to an ext	hybrid	?	26	none declared	M
ReadAny	win/mac/lin/ios/and	Cross-platform e-book application (Tauri desktop plus React Native mobile) that opens EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW, AZW3, FB2, FBZ, CBZ, TXT and UMD, and can	hybrid	active	2162	NOASSERTION (G	M
Remote Incident Manager (RIM) — Pneuma Solutions	win/mac	Cross-platform remote desktop built so blind, low-vision and sighted technicians can drive the same session on equal terms; the accessibility is in th	hybrid	?		commercial	V
remoteSpeechControl (NVDA add-on)	win	NVDA add-on that manages speech during remote sessions — optionally mutes the controlled machine so only the local box speaks; uses NVDA's bundled _re	local-only	?	3	GPL-2.0	M
renpy-nvda-bridge	win	'Enables RenPy to output speech and braille via NVDA' — game-engine to screen-reader bridge.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
RustDesk	win/mac/lin/and/ios/web	Self-hostable remote-desktop application positioned as an alternative to TeamViewer/AnyDesk/Splashtop [vendor]; clipboard sync between endpoints is pa	hybrid	active	120	AGPL-3.0	L
RVC WebUI	win/lin	Train a retrieval-based voice-conversion model from under 10 minutes of voice data.	local-only	?	37245	MIT	M
SAPI-POC / SAPI-Bridge (AceCentre)	win	Design + proof-of-concept for a Windows SAPI DLL that forwards every speak call to a background pipe service holding TTS engines warm in memory.	hybrid	?	1	open source (A	M
scr-ocr	win	Windows area-screenshot tool that lays recognized text over the screenshot as real selectable text — a local imitation of macOS Live Text, built on El	local-only	?	0	MIT	M
Screenshot OCR / SnapOCR / MiniSnip / HushSnap / SnipText / Long	win/lin/mac	A large cluster of small hotkey-to-clipboard OCR utilities found repeatedly during the sweep: press a hotkey, drag a box, get the text on the clipboar	local-only	?	0	mixed: some MI	L
ScreenTranslate	win	Lightweight Windows screen OCR and translation utility.	unknown	?	2	none declared	V
ServantVoice (winget)	win	Voice application published under the ServantVoice publisher in winget-pkgs.	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
ShareX	win	Windows capture suite with region capture and built-in OCR among many post-capture actions; no text-to-speech feature found in its README.	local-only	active	39	GPL-3.0	M
Simple TTS Reader	win	SourceForge directory entry: 'a small utility that reads text from your clipboard using Microsoft Speech API. Whenever you copy any text, the app inst	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
SnapX	win/lin/mac	Cross-platform fork/successor effort of the ShareX capture tool.	local-only	active	998		L
SofTalk	win	Long-running Japanese desktop reading app built on AQUEST's AquesTalk; its developer CNCC announced on 2022-07-23 that support for the AquesTalk middl	local-only	dormant		freeware	L
Speakonia (CFS-Technologies, Chris Schuster)	win	Free Notepad-like SAPI 4/5 front end from 2002, now permanently frozen: the vendor FAQ opens 'PLEASE NOTE: Development of this program has been discon	local-only	discontinued		freeware for p	M
SpeechCore (still-standing88)	win/lin	C++ cross-platform speech library; the fourth abstraction layer named in Prism's README.	local-only	dormant	1		L
Sprint Plus (Jabbla, distributed in France by Cimis)	win	Belgian-origin reading and writing aid for DYS users sold in the French market; positioned as 'Aide à la lecture'. [lang: French, Dutch; English UI: y	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	L
stt2tts-mcp	win/mac/lin	Local-first STT/TTS MCP server with hot-swappable engines (faster-whisper, piper, kokoro, coqui, ollama, lmstudio, openai).	hybrid	?	2	MIT	M
Talon Voice	win/mac/legacy	Cross-platform hands-free computer control by voice, eye tracking and noise — a full alternative input stack.	local-only	?		Closed source;	L
Text2Speech (SourceForge, C#)	win	'Text2Speech is a small and easy to use Text To Speech (TTS) application written in C#. It uses the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to run.' Distinct fro	os-native	unknown		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
text2speech.org scraping function for AutoHotkey	win	An r/AutoHotkey regular's WinHttpRequest function that queues text on text2speech.org and plays the result, with session-cookie handling and a tooltip	cloud-API	unknown		n/a	M
textsnap	win/mac/lin	Snap any image, screenshot or webpage into plaintext with one command — CPU-only ONNX/PaddleOCR, no GPU, no cloud.	local-only	?	179	MIT	M
textspeech and txtreader (SourceForge minor Windows tier)	win	Two minimal SourceForge Windows entries found while probing the older freeware tier: 'Enjoy text to speech application for windows' (needs .NET 3.5) a	os-native	unknown		unknown (no SF	V
trinity (zhubby)	win/mac/lin	Rust/egui always-on-top desktop assistant: Ctrl+Shift+T translates the current selection with DeepL, Ctrl+Shift+V opens a clipboard history picker, ho	cloud-API	active	1	MIT	M
TTS-WebUI Ignition (winget)	win	Launcher/installer package for the TTS-WebUI project, in the winget community repo.	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
UIAComWrapper (TestStack)	win	COM-to-.NET adapter for the Windows Automation API 3.0 COM interfaces.	local-only	dormant	82	none	M
Umi-OCR	win/lin	Free offline OCR software with screenshot OCR, batch image import, PDF recognition and QR handling; no speech output found in the README.	local-only	?	46	MIT	M
UniversalSpeech	win	'Make popular screen readers speak in your application' - an older C++ abstraction over screen readers plus direct SAPI/native synthesis, with a Pytho	local-only	dormant	48	MIT	M
vik-ma/screenshot-OCR	win/lin	Desktop front-end for Tesseract that lets you mark a section of the screen instead of loading an image file.	local-only	?	10	GPL-3.0	M
Vision Assistant Pro (NVDA add-on)	win	NVDA add-on wrapping Google Gemini as an in-screen-reader copilot, including instant translation of selected text, dictation and CAPTCHA solving.	cloud-API	?		unknown	L
vision-access-nvda-addon	win	NVDA add-on that generates descriptive narration of on-screen graphics for blind and low-vision users.	unknown	?	1	none declared	V
VisionAssistantPro	win	NVDA add-on adding AI vision (image/screen description), translation, dictation and CAPTCHA solving.	cloud-API	?	47	GPL-2.0	L
VoiceBroker (AceCentre)	win	Attempt at a Windows SAPI bridge — a Python COM server registering as a SAPI voice so that any SAPI-consuming app can use online/neural voices.	hybrid	?	3	open source (A	M
VoiceLink (ManveerAnand/VoiceLink)	win	Windows shim that exposes Kokoro and other open-source voice models as system voices so apps like Thorium Reader, Edge and Narrator can use them.	local-only	?	21	MIT	V
VoiceWave LocalCore (winget)	win	Voice-related package published under the VoiceWave publisher in winget-pkgs.	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
vs-read-aloud	win	Adds 'Read Aloud Selected Text' support to Visual Studio.	os-native	?	0	check repo	L
w32uiautomation (hnakamur)	win	Go bindings for Windows UI Automation; README marks it unmaintained.	local-only	archived	48	MIT	M
whkd (LGUG2Z)	win	Hotkey daemon for Windows, config-file driven, from the komorebi author.	local-only	active	920	MIT-ish (NOASS	M
Windows Magnifier reading	win	The built-in Windows magnifier can read text on screen aloud from a chosen start point, using the accessibility text layer rather than OCR.	os-native	?		proprietary (b	L
Windows Narrator	win	The screen reader built into Windows; it reads UI elements and text, and offers AI-generated image descriptions, but no documented user-invoked OCR of	hybrid	?		proprietary (b	L
Windows PowerToys — Text Extractor	win	Microsoft PowerToys utility: a global shortcut lets you drag a box over any screen region and OCRs the pixels straight to the clipboard.	os-native	?	110	MIT (PowerToys	D
Windows Snipping Tool — Text Actions	win	The built-in Windows 11 snipping tool recognizes text in a capture and lets you copy it; no speech.	os-native	?		proprietary (b	V
Windows UI Automation + SAPI 5 / OneCore (platform stack)	win	The Windows halves of the stack every Windows reader stands on: UIA (and legacy MSAA/IAccessible2) for reading the UI tree, SAPI 5 and the OneCore/Nat	os-native	?		proprietary (p	D
Windows.Media.Ocr (Windows OCR API)	win	The OS-provided OCR engine on Windows 10 and later, free and offline, driven by installed language packs — the recognizer behind PowerToys Text Extrac	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
wolfmanstout/screen-ocr	win/lin/mac	Python library to perform OCR on portions of the screen with a choice of backends (Tesseract, WinRT, EasyOCR); a library, not an app.	local-only	?	50	Apache-2.0	M
WordTalk	win	Free Microsoft Word add-in that speaks the document, paragraph, sentence or word from the cursor with word-by-word highlighting; the vendor's site sta	os-native	discontinued	170,000	free (propriet	M
wsay	win	'Windows say' CLI; v1.5.0 added clipboard playback and piping specifically in response to an r/AutoHotkey thread asking for 'say text from clipboard'.	local-only	active	172	BSD-3-Clause	M
WYNN / WYNN Wizard / WYNN Reader (Freedom Scientific)	win	Freedom Scientific's literacy-side scan-and-read product for learning disabilities, sold alongside JAWS and OpenBook and positioned against Kurzweil 3	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
zhuguohui/PageReader · lixiaowang/PDFReciter · johnsmith2078/pdf	win/mac/lin/and	Chinese document-scoped readers: word-by-word read with auto-scroll (PageReader), drag-a-box over PDF text to read it (PDFReciter), a PyQt6 PDF reader	hybrid	active	1111	MPL-2.0 (Color	M
Zotero ZoTTS	win/mac/lin	Zotero 7 plugin: inside a Reader tab Ctrl/Cmd+S speaks the selected text, the selected annotations' text, or the whole paper when nothing is selected,	unknown	dormant	208	AGPL-3.0	M
Говорилка (Govorilka)	win	Russian freeware text-to-speech reader in circulation since 1999: reads text aloud, writes the reading to WAV/MP3 at raised speed with size-based spli	local-only	dormant		freeware	M
עלמה רידר / Alma Reader (עלמגו / Almago)	win/legacy	Hebrew reading software built on Hebrew and English linguistic analysis; Tel Aviv University's law library describes it as aimed at users with learnin	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	M
文字朗读神器 (Microsoft Store, publisher site zonboapp.com)	win	Microsoft Store app whose Chinese listing describes a copy-then-press-the-button workflow: '在其它任何软件，直接复制想朗读的文字内容，点朗读按钮即可自动开始朗读' (in any other software	cloud-API	unknown		proprietary	V
Chrome extension: Talkie (Chrome)	ext	Chrome Web Store read-aloud/text-to-speech extension surfaced in the store's own search index.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Chrome extension: Text to Speech (TTS) (Chrome)	ext	Chrome Web Store read-aloud/text-to-speech extension surfaced in the store's own search index.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Chrome extension: Text to Speech AI Voice Generator	ext	Chrome Web Store read-aloud/text-to-speech extension surfaced in the store's own search index.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Chrome extension: Text to Speech TTS AI Reader	ext	Chrome Web Store read-aloud/text-to-speech extension surfaced in the store's own search index.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Chrome extension: Voice Out - Read Aloud Text	ext	Chrome Web Store read-aloud/text-to-speech extension surfaced in the store's own search index.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Firefox add-on: BeeLine Reader	ext	"BeeLine's color gradient makes reading faster/easier fo[r some readers]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: ChatGPT Reader & Transcriber	ext	"Free AI text to speech (tts) and speech to text (stt) w[orkflow]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Circle reader	ext	Reader-mode extension that extracts page content for distraction-free reading [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Gemini Reader	ext	"Natural Gemini AI text to speech (TTS) for the web, PDF[s]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Google Reader: Free Natural AI Text to Speech	ext	"Natural Gemini AI text to speech (TTS) for the web, PDF[s]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Intelligent Speaker	ext	"Intelligent Speaker: smart reader running on high-profile tt[s engines]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Native text to speech (tts)	ext	"Website and PDF text to speech reader. Uses installed v[oices]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Picture Reader	ext	"Picture Reader is a browser plug-in that extracts all t[ext from images]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Read Aloud ff	ext	"Reads text marked by the user aloud." [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Talkie	ext	"Select text on any web page, and have the computer read [it aloud]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Firefox add-on: Text to Speech (TTS)	ext	"Text to Speech is a text to speech engine with natural [voices]" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
orator-chrome-extension	ext	Catalogued from a single sentence in MyronKoch/orator-macos's README describing a browser-extension sibling that reads web pages with Kokoro and Super	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
AceCentre TextAloud (iOS)	ios	Swift iOS app that reads text out sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph or word by word.	os-native	?	11	open source (A	L
Amazon Kindle apps — Assistive Reader / VoiceView	ios/and/legacy	Amazon's in-app text-to-speech for Kindle books, with real-time highlighting and speed control on iOS, Android, Mac and Fire tablets.	os-native	?		Proprietary	V
Dolphin EasyReader	ios/and/win/ext	Free accessible-book reader that connects to about 50 talking-book libraries, and can also read text pasted in from the clipboard — but the free tier	hybrid	commercial-l		Free app with	M
Elocance	ios/and	French mobile application, free to download on iOS and Android, that converts documents and other content into synthesised speech; catalogued by the F	hybrid	unknown		freemium	V
KNFB Reader	ios/and/win	National Federation of the Blind's app that photographs printed text and converts it to speech.	hybrid	?		Proprietary, p	L
Learning Ally	ios/and/legacy	US non-profit audiobook library for print-disabled students, largely human-narrated rather than synthesised, delivered through its own reading apps.	cloud-API	commercial-l		Membership/sub	M
Listen2 Reader	ios	AppleVis directory entry, vendor copy: 'Listen2 runs neural voice models locally on your device, giving you natural-sounding speech without ongoing co	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Lumyeye	ios/and	A subscription app pitched explicitly as the replacement for reading-machine hardware — the commercial shape that is eating this category.	hybrid	unknown		Subscription,	V
Readify: AI Natural Read Aloud	ios	AppleVis directory entry for an iOS reader supporting PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI and AZW.	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Seeing AI / Envision / Lookout / Google Lens	ios/and	Camera-first mobile OCR readers that photograph text in the physical world (or an image) and speak it; several also describe scenes.	hybrid	?		proprietary (S	V
SpeakCamera	ios	Pair of free iPhone Shortcuts: 'SpeakCamera' turns on voice announcements for the camera so text the camera sees is read aloud, and 'StopSpeech' stops	os-native	dormant	2	none declared	V
Speech Central	ios/mac/win/and	Commercial cross-platform reading app (iOS, macOS, Windows, Android) marketed for visual impairment and dyslexia, covering web pages, documents and eb	hybrid	?		Proprietary, f	L
Voice Dream Reader	ios/mac	Accessibility-first document reader for Apple platforms with synced word highlighting and broad document import; long-standing dyslexia-community stap	hybrid	?		Proprietary, s	L
AccessLint screenreaders (Auto-VO / VoiceOver.js)	mac	A Node CLI and library that starts VoiceOver from the command line, drives it with AppleScript, and dumps every announcement as text.	local-only	?	183	MIT	M
Aftertone	mac/win/lin	On-device daemon that speaks a short summary after a coding agent (Cursor, Claude Code) answers, using Supertonic ONNX.	local-only	?	11	MIT	L
agent-desktop	mac/win/lin	A native desktop-automation CLI that exposes OS accessibility trees as structured JSON with deterministic element refs, built for AI agents rather tha	local-only	active	1	Apache-2.0	L
Apple Books — Speak Screen / VoiceOver reading (built-in)	mac/ios	Apple ships no dedicated in-app 'read this book aloud' button in Books; reading is done through the OS Spoken Content / VoiceOver layer.	os-native	?		Proprietary (b	L
Apple Speech Synthesis Provider Audio Unit	mac/ios/legacy	AppleVis forum post announcing Apple's API that lets third-party synthesisers register as system voices for accessibility features, shipped with iOS 1	os-native	active		Apple platform	L
Apple Vision framework (VNRecognizeTextRequest) / VisionKit Live	mac/ios	Apple's on-device text recognition API, the engine behind Live Text and behind every macOS OCR utility in this list (TRex, Textinator, macOCR, ocrit,	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
aria-at-automation-driver	mac/win	W3C WebSocket server letting clients observe what a screen reader enunciates and simulate user input.	local-only	?	10	NOASSERTION	M
ax-kit / AXKit (Akazm)	mac	Fork-derived Swift wrapper for the macOS accessibility client APIs (originally forked from AXSwift).	local-only	dormant	3	none	M
AXSwift	mac	A Swift wrapper over the macOS Accessibility client API, giving typed access to attributes like the focused element and its selected text.	local-only	dormant	413	MIT	M
BetterPopupTranslateSelection.spoon (rshlin)	mac	Hammerspoon Spoon that shows a popup with a context menu when text is selected, for translation.	local-only	dormant	0		L
BetterSwiftAX (beeper)	mac	Swift wrapper around the macOS AX APIs, maintained by Beeper.	local-only	active	5	none	M
BetterTouchTool	mac	macOS automation app that since v5.177 ships a predefined 'OCR / Recognize / Extract Text from Clipboard Contents / Image' action, documented as combi	os-native	?		proprietary, p	M
Cheese! OCR	mac	macOS hotkey OCR that recognizes a selected screen area entirely on-device via Apple Vision and copies the text.	os-native	?		proprietary	V
Clicknow	mac	Commercial macOS selection tool: select text in any app and get AI translation, explanation, summary or search - named by MoePeek's README as the robu	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary (m	V
clipboard-tts (khiet)	mac	macOS command-line script that reads the clipboard with pbpaste, synthesizes it locally with Kokoro, and plays it through mpv over mpv's JSON IPC sock	local-only	active	0	None declared	M
clipper (wincent)	mac/lin	'Clipboard access for local and remote tmux sessions' [vendor] — a listener on the local machine that accepts text over a socket or TCP and places it	local-only	active	687	BSD-2-Clause	M
CursorBounds (Aeastn)	mac	Swift package that retrieves the on-screen position and bounds of the text caret in macOS apps via the Accessibility API - the primitive a floating 's	local-only	active	120	none	M
debrief (rs07-git)	mac	macOS floating read-along panel for Claude Code responses, with word highlighting and attention chimes; the text is handed to it by a hook rather than	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Desktop Reader (hlindquist/bookreaderpackages)	mac/win	Packaged desktop application described by its author as a screen-region OCR reader with AI text-to-speech, distributed as a macOS arm64 DMG and a Wind	unknown	active	0	none declared	L
DFAXUIElement (DevilFinger)	mac	Objective-C helper for driving AXUIElement from macOS apps.	local-only	dormant	61	none	M
Dolphin EasyReader	mac	"Global links to over 50 libraries... Access magazines, newspapers and periodicals or import files and read clipboard text." [vendor]	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Drafts — Speak Selection	mac/ios	The Drafts editor has an Editor > Speak Selection menu item that opens a speech interface with pause/resume.	os-native	?		proprietary	V
FluidVoice (altic-dev)	mac	macOS dictation app with on-device speech-to-text and AI enhancement - the speech-to-text counterpart that Murmur was written as the inverse of.	local-only	active	9451	GPL-3.0	M
get-selected-text (yetone)	mac/win/lin	Tiny Rust library that obtains the currently selected text on macOS, Windows and Linux behind one call — the reusable L1 primitive underneath a large	local-only	dormant	209	unknown/NOASSE	M
gruut	mac/win/lin	Tokenizer, text cleaner and phonemizer for many languages.	local-only	?	331	MIT	M
Hammerspoon	mac	macOS Lua automation framework with global hotkey binding and a built-in speech module, commonly paired with an external Vision-OCR binary to assemble	os-native	?	16	MIT	M
hammerspoon-penguin-click (KirkAlton-Class7)	mac	Hammerspoon Spoon adding Linux-style primary selection and middle-click paste to macOS.	local-only	active	0		L
hifi-gan-bwe	mac/win/lin	Bandwidth extension for audio (upsampling speech quality).	local-only	?	225	MIT	M
Highlight AI	mac/win	Desktop AI assistant that reads on-screen context across every app so you can ask about what you are looking at without copying it into a chat box.	cloud-API	?		commercial	V
HotKey (soffes)	mac	Swift wrapper for Carbon RegisterEventHotKey global shortcuts on macOS.	local-only	dormant	1077	MIT	M
isimud	mac	"AI-native macOS menu bar text-to-speech and MCP server for agents" [vendor, crates.io description]; repo tagline "Have your agents speak to you".	hybrid	active	0	MIT	V
kAXSelectedTextAttribute / AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue (macOS	mac	The macOS AX client call every non-destructive macOS selection reader is built on: ask the focused AXUIElement for its kAXSelectedTextAttribute. Requi	os-native	active			M
Keyboard Maestro	mac	macOS macro automation with published community macros that screenshot a user-selected area and OCR it; its shell-script action can pipe the result to	os-native	?		proprietary, p	V
KeyboardShortcuts (sindresorhus)	mac	Swift package adding user-customisable global keyboard shortcuts to a macOS app, with a recorder UI.	local-only	active	2689	MIT	M
kokoro-tts-mcp (scottschram)	mac	MCP server exposing Kokoro-82M on Apple Silicon via MLX to coding agents, able to speak the command line and the clipboard.	local-only	active	3	MIT	V
local-voice-reader	mac	Electron reading app for Apple Silicon macOS: paste text or open a .md/.txt file and it reads it aloud in a voice cloned from a 3-15 second recording,	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Lue (paulilaaso/lue)	mac/lin/legacy	Terminal e-book reader for EPUB/PDF/DOCX/HTML/RTF/TXT/MD with word-level highlighting synchronized to speech, auto-scroll, and swappable TTS backends.	hybrid	?	796	GPL-3.0	M
macOCR	mac	macOS tool/CLI that gets any text on your screen into the clipboard using Apple's Vision OCR.	os-native	?	2	none declared	M
macOS Accessibility (AX) API	mac	The AXUIElement C API that VoiceOver, Read & Speak, and third-party Mac selection readers all use to ask the focused app what its selected text is.	os-native	?		proprietary (p	D
macOS AppleScript clipboard-hack selection capture (System Event	mac	The question's own code: back up the clipboard, send Cmd+C via System Events, delay 1, read, delay 1, restore - the asker reports 'This doesn't wo	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
macOS Services "Add to Music as Spoken Track" (formerly iTunes)	mac	Answer's workaround for the missing pause: select text in a browser, right-click, 'add to iTunes as spoken track', then use the media keys - a native	os-native	active		n/a	M
macos-accessibility-client (x3ro)	mac	Rust wrapper around the macOS accessibility-client APIs; get-selected-text's README points at it for the permission prompt.	local-only	active	31	none	M
macos_accessibility_client (ahkohd)	mac	Node.js wrapper around the same macOS accessibility-client APIs, for Electron-shaped apps.	local-only	dormant	7	none	M
Magnet (Clipy)	mac	Global-hotkey library for macOS from the Clipy clipboard-manager project.	local-only	active	450	MIT	M
Marker (Mazide)	mac	Swift menu-bar app that 'Watches text selections system-wide via the Accessibility API' and stores them in its own buffer; README states 'Strict separ	local-only	active	4	MIT	M
mekedron/ocr	mac	Single-binary Go tool for macOS: capture a screen region, recognize with Apple Vision, pipe to pbcopy or wire to a Hammerspoon hotkey.	os-native	?	3	MIT	M
mkhd (Miigon)	mac	Layer-based hotkey daemon for macOS.	local-only	dormant	17	MIT	M
Multi OCR (Alfred workflow)	mac	"Run OCR on screenshots, images, and PDFs" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
Narrly: Read Aloud PDF & Text	mac	"Reads PDF, EPUB, Word, RTF, Text and images... Speech is synthesized on your device... Supports TTS for 50+ languages." [vendor]	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
node-get-selected-text (yetone)	mac/win/lin	The Node binding of the same cross-platform selected-text primitive, for Electron and Tauri-shaped desktop readers.	local-only	dormant	41	none declared	M
npm: @guidepup/virtual-screen-reader	mac/win/lin	"Virtual Screen Reader driver for unit test automation." [vendor].	unknown	active		unknown	V
npm: speech-rule-engine	mac/win/lin	"A standalone speech rule engine for XML structures" [vendor] — turns MathML into spoken descriptions.	unknown	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: AI Selection Toolbar	mac/win/lin	"AI-powered toolbar for selected text with TTS, translation, explanation, and wor[d lookup]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Aloud	mac/win/lin	"Speak text from your notes. Converts text to speech in real-time using lifelike [voices]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Apple TTS	mac/win/lin	"Read notes aloud using macOS native text-to-speech." [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Chatty	mac/win/lin	"Allows you to listen to your notes using text-to-speech. Uses the browser's buil[t-in engine]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Edge TTS	mac/win/lin	"Read notes aloud using Microsoft Edge Read Aloud API (free, high quality text-to-[speech])" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Eleven Labs	mac/win/lin	"Turn your notes into text-to-speech audio files with Eleven Labs." [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Hermes TTS	mac/win/lin	"Generate lightweight audio from a markdown note and prepend timestamped metadata" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Lens OCR	mac/win/lin	"Capture screen regions and digitize handwritten notes via native macOS and Windo[ws OCR]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Local Voiceover - Private TTS	mac/win/lin	"Speak selected text with local Inflect Micro v2 synthesis." [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Murmur	mac/win/lin	"Read your notes aloud with karaoke-style highlighting. Multiple TTS providers su[pported]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Note Reader	mac/win/lin	"Provides text-to-speech (TTS) for notes or clipped articles by reading them alou[d]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Open Reader	mac/win/lin	"Obsidian local TTS plugin for reading selected text and Markdown notes aloud" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Read Along	mac/win/lin	Sentence-by-sentence read-aloud with the current sentence highlighted; exports notes to an offline-readable page [vendor, Chinese listing].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Text Extractor	mac/win/lin	"A (companion) plugin to facilitate the extraction of text from images (OCR) and [PDFs]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Text to Speech (joethei)	mac/win/lin	"Hear your notes." [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Text2Audio	mac/win/lin	"Convert text to speech." [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
Obsidian plugin: Voice (chrisurf)	mac/win/lin	"Listen to your notes as natural speech with text-to-speech (TTS). Read notes alo[ud]" [vendor]	hybrid	active		unknown	V
OCR (Alfred workflow, alanhe)	mac	"Take a screenshot and copy its text to the clipboard" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
OCR Light (Alfred workflow)	mac	"Copy screenshot text to the clipboard" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
OCR Text Recognition: Textify	mac	Mac App Store OCR text-recognition utility (iSolid SPRL).	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
ocrit	mac	Command-line utility that performs OCR on image files using Apple's Vision framework, outputting text or files.	os-native	?	187	BSD-2-Clause	M
Omnivox	mac/win/lin	'Omnivox is an Emacspeak TTS server designed to be cross platform.'	unknown	unknown		unknown	V
OneTalker	mac/win/lin	'OneTalker is a free, open-source Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) desktop app' — 31 stars, the highest-starred TTS-relevant repo foun	unknown	unknown	31	unknown	V
OpenPhonemizer	mac/win/lin	Permissively-licensed espeak-compatible IPA phonemizer based on DeepPhonemizer.	local-only	?	112	BSD-3-Clause-C	M
OwlOCR	mac	macOS OCR app for screenshots, PDFs and local AI processing.	local-only	?		proprietary, p	V
owocr	mac/win/lin	"Multi-service, multi-platform optical character recognition" [vendor] — OCR daemon that can watch the clipboard or a screen area and feed recognised	hybrid	active	283	GPL-3.0	V
phonemizer	mac/win/lin	Text-to-phoneme converter wrapping espeak-ng, festival and segments.	local-only	?	1	GPL-3.0	M
PopClip (relationship anchor, already-known)	mac	Named alongside Clicknow in MoePeek's alternatives section as the macOS selection-action baseline; recorded here only as the traversal edge.	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	L
PopClip extension: Say	mac	Official PopClip extension that speaks the selected text through the macOS say command; voice and rate can be overridden per extension setting, and	os-native	active		see extension	M
portable-translator (Zxx20061021)	mac	macOS desktop translator whose selection watcher tries AXSelectedText first and falls back to other macOS-specific APIs.	hybrid	?		check repo	M
Prizmo	mac	"Scanning application with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)" [vendor] — Creaceed's macOS scanning/OCR app.	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
PyScreenReader (PyPI)	mac/win/lin	Cross-platform Python library wrapping the native accessibility APIs to collect the on-screen widget tree — the Python counterpart to pywinauto/FlaUI/	local-only	?		unknown	L
qtspeech (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"Enables access to text-to-speech engines" [vendor] — the Qt Speech module.	local-only	active		LGPL-3.0-only	V
Raycast / Alfred / Hammerspoon / skhd / Karabiner-Elements (trig	mac	General macOS hotkey and launcher layers that supply L2 only — you bind them to a say, pbpaste | say, or CLI-reader invocation to assemble a sele	os-native	?	12	mixed — Hammer	M
Raycast extension: Easy OCR	mac	Raycast extension with one command: select a screen area, Tesseract extracts the text. [vendor, store manifest]	local-only	active		see store list	V
Raycast extension: Read My Screen	mac	Raycast extension that captures a screen region, a window, the full screen, a clipboard image, a local image file, or the active browser tab's text an	cloud-API	active	62	not declared i	M
Raycast extension: ScreenOCR	mac	Raycast extension doing local OCR of a captured screen area or the entire screen, with a language picker and a barcode mode. [vendor, store manifest]	local-only	active		see store list	V
raycast-tts	mac	Raycast extension for macOS with a local Python WebSocket server running Piper: you TYPE into its text area and it speaks each word as you press space	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
read-aloud.el	mac/lin/win	Emacs package that does live speech-to-TEXT transcription: it captures microphone audio, detects voice activity, and sends the transcript into an Emac	hybrid	active	2	GPL-3.0-or-lat	M
readio (hrhrng/readio)	mac/lin/win	Rust terminal e-book reader (EPUB/PDF/Markdown/text) with local-model read-aloud that highlights the spoken sentence and the current word.	local-only	?	7	MIT	M
Selection (pot-app)	mac/win/lin	The cross-platform selection-acquisition crate extracted from pot-desktop: get the text selected by the cursor, on X11, Wayland, Windows and macOS.	local-only	dormant	70	GPL-3.0	M
selection-translator (huacius)	mac	Minimal macOS selection translator for English reading and learning: select a word or phrase, get a translation card with UK/US pronunciation display	hybrid	active	2	MIT	M
Shottr	mac	Free-to-use macOS screenshot app with a hotkey-driven OCR: press a hotkey, select an area, text is copied to the clipboard.	os-native	?		proprietary (f	V
Sinter	mac/lin/win	Research 'Accessible Remote Desktop Protocol': a remote-desktop system that transmits UI semantics rather than pixels so assistive technology works ov	local-only	?	3	NOASSERTION	M
skhd (asmvik)	mac	Hotkey daemon for macOS: a config file of key : command lines that runs any shell command on a global chord. Gives a Speak-Selection pipeline its ke	local-only	active	8063	MIT	M
skhd.zig (jackielii)	mac	Zig port of skhd for macOS.	local-only	active	607	MIT	M
SnapPop (gradinnovate)	mac	macOS background utility described as a PopClip alternative: it detects a text selection and shows a floating menu of quick actions such as copy and s	local-only	dormant	1	Apache-2.0	M
Speak Text Pro	mac	"Convert web pages text into speech! Get your Mac talking with this app." [vendor]	os-native	dormant		proprietary	V
speak-app (eliefrancis5)	mac	169-line macOS menu-bar app in Python: click the menu-bar icon, TYPE text into a box, press Speak, and it shells out to say with a chosen voice and	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
speak-selected-text-sublime	mac	Sublime Text plugin that pipes the editor selection to the Mac say command.	os-native	?	11	MIT	L
Speech Central: Text to Speech (Mac App Store listing)	mac	Paid Mac App Store text-to-speech reader; surfaced in the macSoftware search for 'screen reader' at $9.99 with 0 US ratings recorded.	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary	L
star (Speaking Terminal Access Reader)	mac/win/lin	"star is an accessible, GUI-first document reader and Markdown authoring tool with built-in text-to-speech" [vendor, PyPI long description].	local-only	active		GPL-3.0-or-lat	V
star / star-reader (leavesofgrass)	mac/win/lin	'Speaking Terminal Access Reader' — a GUI-first accessible document reader that opens PDF, Word, EPUB, PowerPoint, web pages and spreadsheets, reads t	local-only	?	,	GPL-3.0-or-lat	M
swiftmac	mac	'Swiftmac TTS server for emacspeak' — a Swift-written Emacspeak speech server for macOS, hosted only on sourcehut.	os-native	unknown		unknown	V
SwiftTranslate (blackTDE)	mac	macOS global translation utility explicitly inspired by PopClip and Raycast Translate: select text anywhere, hotkey, translated popup.	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
Text Scraper (johnbean393)	mac	macOS menu-bar app that OCRs the text on your displays on Cmd+Ctrl+C and presents it grouped for selection and copying; it has no speech of its own an	local-only	dormant	10	none declared	M
Text to Speech PDF Reader	mac	"The app will highlight words as it reads and scroll the page automatically... Choose a primary and secondary voice." [vendor]	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Textinator	mac	macOS status-bar app that automatically runs Vision OCR on every screenshot you take and puts the text on the clipboard.	os-native	?	203	MIT	M
textra	mac	macOS CLI converting images, PDFs and audio to text using Apple's APIs.	os-native	?	755	MIT	M
TextSniper	mac	Proprietary macOS menu-bar OCR: hotkey, drag over any screen region — including video frames and locked UI elements — and the text lands on the clipbo	os-native	?		proprietary, p	V
TRex	mac	macOS menu-bar OCR: hotkey, drag a region, text on the clipboard, using Apple's on-device Vision framework.	os-native	?	1	MIT	M
tts.nvim	mac/lin	Neovim plugin that speaks the visual selection, the current line, paragraph or section from the buffer, with a play/stop/queue keymap set and a choice	hybrid	active	11	None declared	M
Viz (alienator88)	mac	Swift macOS snip-to-text tool (v2.3.3) built on the Apple Vision framework: extract text, QR codes, barcodes and colours from a screen snippet on a cu	local-only	dormant	526	NOASSERTION (G	M
Voice Reader .	mac	"Reads copied text from emails, apps, notes, etc. Supports reading PDF files. Reads website content. Works even without an internet connection." [vend	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
VoxBar (+ voxbar-ob Obsidian plugin)	mac	Local macOS TTS app driven from Obsidian: read the selection, the whole note, or fetch and read the article at a selected source URL.	local-only	?	0	check repo	M
VS Code extension: Text to Speech Preview	mac/win/lin	"Preview selected text or the active document with local syst[em TTS]" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
WebOutLoud: Web Text to Speech	mac	Reads web-page text aloud inside its own browser view. [vendor listing]	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Xpop-lineage note: PopClip alternatives that do NOT speak	mac	Bare macOS selection-popup experiment surfaced by an 'alternative to PopClip' README search; no speech capability found.	local-only	active	0	none declared	L
Ability (TBosak/ability)	legacy	Browser extension bundling accessibility controls, including TTS, for users with varying degrees of ability.	local-only	?	22	none declared	V
ABiSee Eye-Pal Solo / Eye-Pal ACE / Zoom-Ex	legacy	The previous generation of camera reading machines; ABiSee was absorbed by Freedom Scientific and the Eye-Pal line is marked discontinued by retailers	local-only	discontinued		n/a	M
Access Lens — Kane, Frey & Wobbrock, CHI 2013	legacy	Computer-vision gesture tracking that lets a blind user perform accessible touch gestures on paper documents and physical objects that have no screen	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
Access Overlays — Kane, Morris, Perkins, Wigdor, Ladner & Wobbro	legacy	Three software overlays (edge projection, neighbourhood browsing, touch-and-speak) that give blind users spatial access to large touch screens.	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
Adapted Digital Exams (CALL Scotland / SQA)	legacy	Scottish exam-board guidance on running SQA digital question papers, including which text readers to use and how to configure Adobe Reader around them	unknown	active		Public sector	M
adult-sharks/spatial-screen-reader · leelaeloo/Senior-OCR-Projec	legacy	Two Korean student/hobby projects: a Chrome extension using OpenCV as a visual-assistance aid, and 읽어드림, a document-reading app aimed at older users.	hybrid	unknown	2	unknown	L
Anki-TTS-Edge (EllisMorrow/Anki-TTS-Edge)	legacy	Edge-TTS tool that both generates Anki card audio and doubles as an immersive reader with real-time highlighting, click-to-play and navigation.	cloud-API	?	14	NOASSERTION (u	V
Apache Guacamole (clientless HTML5 remote desktop gateway) — cli	legacy	Browser-based RDP/VNC/SSH gateway whose manual documents a clipboard text area: 'Text copied/cut within Guacamole will appear here' and 'text that is	hybrid	active	3	Apache-2.0	M
Artificial Analysis Speech Arena Leaderboard	legacy	Second crowd-voted TTS leaderboard on Hugging Face Spaces, comparing systems using each provider's own native voices.	cloud-API	?		see Space	L
Assistive-Webdriver	legacy	Tool for automating end-to-end web application tests driven through a real screen reader in a VM.	local-only	?	28	see repo	L
Audiobook Read-Along plugin for KOReader (stradichenko/audiobook	legacy/and/lin	KOReader plugin adding offline TTS with synchronized word highlighting, automatic page turns, and Bluetooth control on e-ink devices.	local-only	?	108	AGPL-3.0	M
AuraLens	legacy	Flutter prototype assisting blind and low-vision users with real-time scene understanding and text reading (OCR), backed by Gemini models.	cloud-API	?	7	see repo	L
Auris (nikhilprasanth/Auris)	legacy	Offline audiobook-style reader for EPUB/PDF/TXT with local OmniVoice TTS, per-character voices, and synced text highlighting.	local-only	?	20	MIT	M
Bhola (2022) — 'Effect of Text-to-speech Software on Academic Ac	legacy	Small pretest-posttest experiment giving one group four months of text-to-speech software and comparing achievement against an untreated control.	unknown	active		open access	M
Bonifacci, Colombini, Marzocchi, Tobia & Desideri (2022) — 'Text	legacy	Experiment measuring whether text-to-speech changes how often a student's attention drifts off task during reading, alongside comprehension.	unknown	active		open access (W	M
Bookshare Reader	legacy/ios/and	Bookshare's own free reading tool for its accessible-book library, usable in a web browser, on iOS and Android, and on Alexa-enabled devices.	cloud-API	active		Free to Booksh	M
Brèthes, Cavalli, Denis-Noël, Melmi, El Ahmadi, Bianco & Colé (2	legacy	Regression study of which cognitive skills predict text reading fluency versus text reading comprehension in dyslexic and non-dyslexic university stud	unknown	active		open access (F	M
calibre-tts-ebook-viewer (christineye)	legacy	Pre-built-in-TTS calibre viewer plugin using Windows SAPI 5, with paragraph highlighting, click-a-paragraph-to-start select mode, and customizable hot	os-native	?	31	none declared	M
CALL Scotland text-reader catalogue	legacy	Practitioner-written catalogue of 14 Windows and cross-platform text readers, each with its own page giving the literal keystroke sequence a user perf	unknown	active		Public sector	M
Capti Voice	legacy/win/mac/ios/and	Named in an Apple StackExchange answer as a free reader that 'highlights, pauses, etc.' and syncs to phone; the same answer reports it 'can crash a bi	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (f	L
Cavalli, Colé, Brèthes, Lefèvre, Lascombe & Velay (2019) — 'E-bo	legacy	Study of how the reading medium affects long-text comprehension specifically in dyslexic adults.	unknown	active		paywalled (Spr	L
ChatGPT_ReadAloud	legacy	Chrome extension restoring a Read Aloud button in ChatGPT with auto-play and playback controls.	unknown	?	3	Apache-2.0	M
Chen, Hung & Jian (2026) — 'The effects of text-to-speech on rea	legacy	Eye-tracking experiment comparing silent reading with text-to-speech across dyslexia, ADHD-with-reading-difficulty, and typically developing groups.	unknown	active		open access (S	M
Citrix ICA clipboard redirection policy (Restrict session clipbo	legacy	Citrix documents session-to-client clipboard as an administrator-controlled ICA policy: 'When the Restrict session clipboard write setting is Enabled,	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary (C	V
Citrix virtual channel allow list (Virtual Apps and Desktops 210	legacy	From Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2109 onward a virtual-channel allow list restricts third-party virtual channels by default; the NVDA rdAccess do	unknown	active		n/a	M
Clicker and DocsPlus (Crick Software)	legacy	Literacy-support writing environments for schools with built-in speech feedback; named by Adapted Digital Exams among the commercial tools that add te	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial; sc	M
Clicky (farzaa) / Clicky for Windows	legacy	AI companion that sits by the cursor: hold a hotkey, ask about what is on your screen, and it sees the screen and talks back — with a community Window	hybrid	?	7	MIT	M
Clinton-Lisell & Litzinger (2026) — 'Decoding digital reading: a	legacy	Network meta-analysis ranking paper against computers, tablets, e-readers and smartphones for reading comprehension, with scrolling as the moderator.	unknown	active		open access (S	M
Clinton-Lisell (2021) — 'Listening Ears or Reading Eyes: A Meta-	legacy	Meta-analysis comparing comprehension when the same material is read versus listened to, across age groups.	unknown	active		paywalled (SAG	M
Clinton-Lisell (2023) — 'Reading while listening meta-analysis'	legacy	Meta-analysis of audio-assisted reading — seeing the text and hearing it at the same time, which is exactly the Speak-Selection condition.	unknown	active		open access (O	M
cliphist (sentriz)	legacy	Wayland clipboard-history daemon driven by wl-paste --watch; README states clipboard content is 'preserved byte-for-byte' and it has 'No concept of	local-only	active	1520	GPL-3.0	M
clipmenu (cdown)	legacy	X11 clipboard-history manager built on clipnotify + dmenu.	local-only	active	1253	Public Domain	M
clipnotify (cdown)	legacy	Tiny X11 utility that blocks until the clipboard or PRIMARY selection changes, then exits - the event primitive a shell-script selection reader loops	local-only	dormant	256	Public Domain	M
clipvault (Rolv-Apneseth)	legacy	Wayland clipboard-history manager, cliphist-inspired.	local-only	active	115	MIT	M
Creative TextAssist / Texto'LE (DECtalk on Sound Blaster ASP)	legacy	DECtalk-derived TTS bundled with Sound Blaster 16 and AWE32 cards, with a Windows 'TextAssist TextReader' front end - and a hard dependency on the car	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, b	M
Do GUI Agents Believe Their Eyes? Diagnosing State-Belief Relian	legacy	Diagnostic benchmark that measures, with paired single-channel interventions, whether a multimodal agent's belief about what is on screen comes from t	unknown	active		unknown	M
DSpeech (Dimio)	legacy	Italian freeware SAPI front end with speech-recognition-driven branching, long distributed as a portable app; the author's own site is unreachable fro	local-only	dormant		freeware	M
dxhd (dakyskye)	legacy	X11 hotkey daemon whose config is a shell script.	local-only	dormant	100	GPL-3.0	M
EASTIN (European Assistive Technology Information Network)	legacy	Federated European assistive-product database aggregating national AT registries under an ISO 9999 classification.	unknown	active		EU-funded netw	L
Edge-endpoint proxies on Cloudflare Workers (DIYgod/cloudflare-e	legacy	Serverless relays that expose the Edge Read Aloud endpoint (often in an OpenAI-compatible shape) from a Worker, mainly to route around region blocks a	cloud-API	?	199	see repos	?
Emmabuntüs accessibility work	legacy	A Linux distribution's accessibility programme, integrating screen-reading and speech synthesis choices at distro level.	local-only	?		open (distro)	L
Envision Glasses (Envision, on Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2	legacy	Head-worn camera reader built on discontinued Google hardware — Instant Text, Scan Text and Batch Scan, plus an LLM question-answering mode over what	hybrid	commercial-l		Hardware purch	M
Explain Code Audio (JetBrains Marketplace plugin)	legacy	JetBrains IDE plugin that explains selected code and plays the explanation back as text-to-speech audio.	unknown	?		Not verified	L
Faster Text-to-Speeches: Enhancing Blind People's Information Sc	legacy	Experiment comparing raising the speech rate of one voice against running two or three voices at once, to find which lets a listener scan faster witho	local-only	dormant		n/a (study)	M
Foliate (johnfactotum/foliate)	legacy	GTK e-book reader for Linux whose read-aloud is delegated to speech-dispatcher with output modules such as espeak-ng.	local-only	?	8614	GPL-3.0	M
Freedom Scientific RUBY 10 HD Speech (Vispero)	legacy	Handheld video magnifier with an OCR speech mode — magnification first, reading aloud second.	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial har	L
GNOME Shell issue #5559 - "Select to speak a specific UI element	legacy	Open upstream feature request from a visually impaired user asking GNOME for select-to-speak with word highlighting and a Ctrl-to-stop key.	local-only	active		n/a	M
GNOME Speaks	legacy	GNOME Shell extension adding dictation and 'text-to-speech readback' powered by Azure Speech Services, wired through a D-Bus service to a four-project	cloud-API	active	1	GPL-3.0	M
Google Chrome — Listen to this page / Reading mode (built-in)	legacy/ext	Chrome's own read-aloud: 'Listen to this page' on Android and a listen control inside desktop Reading mode, with text highlighting and auto-scroll.	hybrid	?		Proprietary (b	V
Google Docs — Accessibility > Speak > Speak selection (built-in)	legacy	Google Docs can speak the current selection via the Accessibility menu, once screen-reader support is enabled in the document.	hybrid	?		Proprietary (G	L
Grid 3 (Smartbox / thinksmartbox)	legacy	Windows AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) application with a Computer Control feature for driving the whole desktop, and a speech layer	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, c	L
Guidepup	legacy	Screen-reader DRIVER for test automation — programmatically drives VoiceOver and NVDA from Node.js and captures what they speak.	local-only	?	500	MIT	L
Guidepup Playwright	legacy	Playwright integration for the Guidepup screen-reader automation library.	local-only	?	80	MIT	L
Harpo Software / Speech2Go (harposoftware.com)	legacy	A live retail counter for Nuance and IVONA desktop voices — the channel that still sells voices whose original vendors have shut their own doors.	local-only	commercial-l		Per-voice prop	M
hkd (aaronamk)	legacy	Display-server-agnostic hotkey daemon; README: 'Works in Xorg, Wayland, and the TTY (using libevdev)'. Requires adding your user to the input group.	local-only	active	25	MIT	M
Hui & Godfroid (2025) — 'Listening, Reading, or Both? Rethinking	legacy	Registered report testing whether reading while listening improves comprehension; it found the opposite of its own preregistered hypothesis.	unknown	active		open access	M
HumanWare Victor Reader Stream 3	legacy	Tactile-keypad DAISY/audio player with on-device TTS for text files — you load content into it; it has no camera and no view of your computer.	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial har	M
hyprland-global-shortcuts-v1 (Hyprland Wayland protocol)	legacy	Hyprland's own Wayland protocol for global shortcuts, used underneath its GlobalShortcuts portal backend; a registered shortcut appears in `hyprctl gl	os-native	active			L
Interaction Proxies for Runtime Repair and Enhancement of Mobile	legacy	Strategy that inserts a proxy between an application's real interface and the interface a person perceives, so a third party can re-map an interaction	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
ISO/IEC 13066 family — 'Information technology — Interoperabilit	legacy	The international standard family that defines what an application must expose so an assistive technology can read it — Part 1 the general requirement	unknown	active		paid standard	L
iSpeak It (ZappTek)	legacy	Mac utility (2004-2006 era) that turned documents, web pages and RSS feeds into MP3/AAC tracks in iTunes using Mac OS X's own text-to-speech, with a r	local-only	discontinued		proprietary sh	M
J-Say and J-Dictate (Hartgen Consultancy)	legacy	Commercial JAWS scripting products that bridge JAWS with Dragon speech recognition so a blind user can dictate and hear results; listed for DSA fundin	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial add	M
Jump Desktop (RDP, VNC, Fluid)	legacy	macOS/iOS/Android remote-desktop client supporting RDP, VNC and its own 'Fluid Remote Desktop' protocol; its own support article confirms the client r	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (p	M
kaccessible (KDE)	legacy	Historical KDE QAccessibleBridgePlugin providing focus tracking and a screen reader inside the Qt accessibility bridge; superseded when the bridge mov	local-only	discontinued	4	LGPL	M
KDE Discuss t/18444 - "Method to trigger speech dispatcher to re	legacy	Jul 2024 KDE thread asking exactly the project question - Meta+Space passing the selection to spd-say - and receiving no reply at all.	local-only	dormant		n/a	M
KDE Klipper D-Bus clipboard read (qdbus org.kde.klipper /klipper	legacy	A Russian-language Linux forum thread on reading the primary selection under Wayland; the poster reports reading the buffer straight out of Klipper ov	local-only	unknown		n/a	L
KDE post-Jovie speech story (QtSpeech + Okular + KMouth + spd-sa	legacy	Jeremy Whiting's 2021 statement of what replaced Jovie on KDE, verbatim: notifications go through QtSpeech via each application's notification configu	local-only	active			M
Keelor, Creaghead, Silbert, Breit & Horowitz-Kraus (2023) — 'Imp	legacy	Five-condition experiment separating the effect of text-to-speech itself from the effect of one of its presentation features — synchronised word highl	unknown	active		paywalled (Spr	M
Kindle device text-to-speech (2009-2013 era) and its VoiceView s	legacy	Amazon shipped read-aloud on Kindle e-readers from 2009, removed it from later hardware, then reintroduced audio only through a separately purchased U	hybrid	active		proprietary, d	M
kokoro-tts-chrome-extension (paul-rinaldi)	legacy	Chrome extension wiring the Kokoro TTS model into the browser (no description or license published).	unknown	?	0	none declared	L
KWtype	legacy	'Virtual keyboard input tool for KDE Wayland' - the KWin-specific answer where wtype's wlroots protocol is unavailable.	local-only	active	5	MIT	M
lectern (Acumane)	legacy	Listen to PDFs with natural TTS and read-along text prompts.	local-only	?	11	see repo	L
Lecteur PDF accessible (RGAA Checker)	legacy	Free in-browser accessible PDF reader with reflowable text, dyslexia-friendly typography profiles, OCR for scanned documents, dual view and annotation	unknown	?		free (terms un	L
Lectura (Dolphin service menu, espeak)	legacy	Named by a KDE Discuss responder as 'a dolphin service menu called lectura that uses espeak to speak text from a file using the context menu'.	local-only	active		n/a	L
lefthk (leftwm)	legacy	Hotkey daemon in Rust from the LeftWM project.	local-only	active	29	Rust	M
Loquendo TTS Director	legacy	The Java, multi-platform, client-server prompt-authoring suite inside the Loquendo TTS SDK - a listen-and-edit tool for tuning recorded-sounding promp	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, p	M
Markdown Read Aloud (Robin-Reiche/markdown-read-aloud)	legacy	VS Code extension that renders a Markdown file as a reader view and speaks it with Edge neural voices, highlighting the spoken sentence and auto-scrol	cloud-API	?	3	MIT	M
Markit and Talkit — Shi, Zhao & Azenkot, UIST 2017	legacy	Toolkit pair for attaching audio annotations to 3D-printed models: a sighted maker marks regions and writes text, then a blind user touches the printe	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
Mayari (BoltzmannEntropy)	legacy	Native macOS document read-aloud and audiobook workspace for PDF, DOCX and EPUB.	local-only	?	5	see repo	L
Microsoft Agent	legacy	The animated-character runtime that gave a generation of Windows apps a speaking assistant over SAPI 4; Microsoft's own support article states it 'has	os-native	discontinued		proprietary, b	M
Microsoft Reader (.lit)	legacy	Microsoft's pre-Kindle ebook reader for PC and Pocket PC, whose PC version carried an optional text-to-speech plug-in; announced for discontinuation i	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, f	M
Microsoft Speech API 4 (SAPI 4) as a substrate	legacy	The 1998 speech interface that every Windows reader in this historical set was built on, and the reason so many of them are unusable today - modern sc	os-native	discontinued		proprietary, p	M
Microsoft Word / Outlook / PowerPoint / OneNote — Speak and Read	legacy	Office ships two distinct features: Speak reads only the text you select; Read Aloud reads the whole document from the cursor with a floating player.	os-native	?		Proprietary (M	V
MorseWriter / EyeCommander / FaceCommander (AceCentre)	legacy	Alternative-input assistive tools from the same charity: eye-movement tracking, facial-gesture control, and Morse-to-text entry.	local-only	?	58	open source (A	L
MS-RDPEA — Remote Desktop Protocol: Audio Output Virtual Channel	legacy	Microsoft's published RDP audio channel spec, described as the extension 'which transfers audio data from the server to the client' [measured] — the d	unknown	active		Microsoft Open	M
MS-RDPECLIP — Remote Desktop Protocol: Clipboard Virtual Channel	legacy	Microsoft's published RDP clipboard channel spec; abstract reads 'enables users to seamlessly transfer data via the system clipboard between applicati	unknown	active		Microsoft Open	M
MsEdgeTTS (Migushthe2nd)	legacy	Node/TypeScript client for the same Edge Read Aloud endpoint, for stacks that cannot shell out to Python.	cloud-API	?	335	see repo	?
neoreader	legacy	Screen reader for Neovim that reads code with language-aware structure, including infix operators in Haskell/Scala and Python AST analysis.	local-only	?	29	see repo	L
neru (y3owk1n)	legacy	Navigate your entire screen without touching the mouse.	local-only	?	565	see repo	L
NextUp — Cerence voice store (for TextAloud)	legacy	Cerence Vocalizer Embedded voices sold per-voice to consumers, with the catch that they are locked to NextUp's TextAloud application.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary, p	M
Nova (bigduu) / Screenhand / Orbination Desktop Vision	legacy	A cluster of MCP servers giving an LLM agent eyes and hands on the desktop — screenshots, Apple Vision or Windows OCR, UI Automation trees, and mouse/	hybrid	?	15	varies	L
obsidian-speechify-reader (TheShiningVampire)	legacy	Obsidian plugin that hands the current note to the Speechify browser extension — Alt+A to listen, Alt+S to save to the Speechify library — with no API	cloud-API	?	0	MIT	V
obsidian-tts-kokoro (yuengling)	legacy	Fork of joethei's Obsidian Text to Speech plugin retargeted at the Kokoro model.	unknown	?	0	GPL-3.0	D
obsidian-tts-reader (10x-oss)	legacy	Obsidian plugin that reads Markdown notes aloud starting from the current cursor position.	unknown	?	0	MIT	V
OCR - Image Reader (Chrome extension)	legacy	Chrome extension using tesseract.js to recognize text in images on a page, injecting the library on demand and removing it afterwards.	local-only	?		not verified	V
Odiofy	legacy	Named in one r/accessibility comment as 'a decent app which is free and can be downloaded and installed on your local machine'; I could not verify a p	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
openai-edge-tts (travisvn)	legacy	A local server that speaks the OpenAI /v1/audio/speech protocol but synthesises through the free Edge Read Aloud endpoint - a drop-in shim that makes	hybrid	?	2	GPL-3.0	M
opendataloader-pdf	legacy	Open-source PDF parser producing AI-ready structured data, with automated PDF accessibility remediation.	local-only	?	28	open source (s	L
OpenGuider	legacy	Desktop AI companion that watches the screen, listens to the user's voice, and guides them step by step with spoken actions.	hybrid	?	164	unknown	L
OpenReader (richardr1126/openreader)	legacy	Self-hostable Next.js read-along document reader for EPUB/PDF/DOCX/TXT/MD with word-by-word highlighting derived from Whisper alignment, plus audioboo	hybrid	?	489	MIT	M
OpenWebTTS	legacy	Self-described open-source Speechify alternative: read PDFs and EPUBs with local models.	local-only	?	68	MIT	L
Optelec ClearReader+ (Basic / standard / Advanced) — Vispero	legacy	Portable platen-camera reading machine: press one button, it photographs the page and reads it aloud; the Advanced model drives an external monitor so	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial har	M
OrCam Read 3	legacy	Handheld AI reading device: point it at printed or digital text — including a computer screen — press the button, and it reads aloud from that point;	local-only	unknown		commercial	V
OrCam Technologies — vision product line (MyEye, MyReader, Read	legacy	The vendor behind OrCam Read closed its entire low-vision division in July 2024 and pivoted to hearing; a purchase decision here is a decision about a	local-only	discontinued		n/a	M
org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts	legacy	The D-Bus portal interface (documented at version 2) through which a Wayland application registers shortcuts that fire 'regardless of the focused stat	os-native	active			M
[OSC 52 clipboard escape sequence (ESC ] 52 ; c ; base64)](https://terminfo.dev/extensions/osc-52-clipboard)	legacy	A terminal escape sequence that lets a program inside a remote session write to (and optionally read) the LOCAL terminal's system clipboard; the refer	local-only	active		n/a — a contro	M
Overlay Translator	legacy	No-root Android real-time screen translator: OCRs the screen (on-device or cloud), translates, overlays the result in place, and can speak it via TTS.	hybrid	?	518	Apache-2.0	L
phonemizer.js	legacy	eSpeak NG phonemization in JavaScript.	local-only	?	49	Apache-2.0	M
Pied	legacy	Flutter desktop GUI that installs and configures Piper as a Speech Dispatcher back-end on Linux, then downloads and manages voices for it.	local-only	active	290	GPL-3.0	M
Piper Reader for Obsidian (dCO2/obsidian-piper-reader)	legacy	Obsidian plugin that POSTs the selected text to a local Python bridge which drives Piper in Docker over Wyoming TCP and plays the returned WAV.	local-only	?	0	none declared	M
pocket-tts-browser-extension (hiCozyty)	legacy	Browser extension front-ending the Pocket TTS engine, claiming ultra-fast free synthesis.	unknown	?	0	MIT	L
Prefab layers and prefab annotations — Dixon et al., UIST 2014 (	legacy	Extension of the Prefab pixel-reverse-engineering line adding layered interpretation and annotation of recognised interface structure.	local-only	dormant		research proto	L
Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Revers	legacy	System that recognises widgets from the pixels a toolkit painted, so behaviours can be added to applications built with any toolkit on any windowing s	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
primary-selection-unstable-v1 (Wayland protocol)	legacy	The Wayland protocol that carries the X11-style PRIMARY (highlight) selection. Its compositor coverage is far wider than data-control's, but it is a n	os-native	active		MIT (Red Hat)	M
PRISM (ethindp/prism)	legacy	Platform-agnostic Reader Interface for Speech and Messages — one API that refracts a string out to whichever screen reader or TTS backend is present,	local-only	active	58	MPL-2.0	M
pulseaudio-network (ferdiu)	legacy	'A simple client-server program to easily share TCP pulseaudio sinks over the network' [vendor], packaged as RPM and DEB.	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
pwWebSpeak (The Productivity Works, later isSound)	legacy	1996 non-visual browser built on 'first order design' - HTML converted straight to structured audio via a rule base (the Tag Language Definition), byp	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	M
python-global-shortcut-portal (marvin1099)	legacy	Pure-Python client for org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts; description states it 'Lets any application register and receive global keyboard shortc	local-only	active	0	AGPL-3.0	M
qt_wayland_globalshortcut_via_portal (slbtty)	legacy	Minimal Qt demonstration of registering a global shortcut on Wayland through the GlobalShortcuts portal.	local-only	dormant	1		M
rclipd (pmkap)	legacy	Clipboard-manager daemon targeting compositors that implement ext/wlr-data-control.	local-only	active	0	none	M
RD Pipe (rd_pipe-rs)	legacy	'Windows Remote Desktop Services Dynamic Virtual Channel implementation using named pipes, written in Rust' [vendor] — the library the NVDA rdAccess a	local-only	active	9	AGPL-3.0 (as r	M
react-speech-highlight (albirrkarim)	legacy	React / vanilla-JS text-to-speech component that highlights the word and the sentence currently being spoken — the reusable implementation of the kara	hybrid	?	188	unknown	M
read-aloud-best-practices (Readium)	legacy	Documentation project recording best practices for implementing a read-aloud feature in reading apps.	unknown	?	14	see repo	L
read-aloud-local	legacy	Repository named read-aloud-local; carries no description or README summary.	unknown	?	6	MIT	L
read-aloud.el (gromnitsky)	legacy	Emacs package that speaks the word at point, the selected region, or the whole buffer through an external CLI TTS engine such as speech-dispatcher or	local-only	?	35	MIT	M
Read-It-Out (Spartan-71)	legacy	Reads any webpage or article aloud with natural AI voices.	hybrid	?	2	see repo	L
ReadEasy Evolve / Evolve ECO / Evolve MAX (VisionAid; sold by Hu	legacy	The other current standalone reading-machine family: fold-out camera arm over a document, one button, reads aloud — ECO is A4/13 MP, MAX is A3/18 MP.	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial har	V
Readest (readest/readest)	legacy	Cross-platform modern e-book reader with multilingual TTS and read-along narration that highlights text in step with EPUB 3 Media Overlays.	hybrid	?	23223	AGPL-3.0	M
reading-for-listeners	legacy	Deep-learning accessibility application that turns PDFs into audio files, with OCR improvement and inflection-aware TTS.	local-only	?	25	AGPL-3.0	L
Readiris Pro (IRIS / Canon)	legacy	Commercial OCR package on the DSA approved list, used to turn scanned or photographed print into text that a separate reader then speaks.	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; DS	M
readium/speech	legacy	TypeScript library for implementing read-aloud on the Web, from the Readium ebook-standards project.	local-only	?	21	see repo	L
ReadSpeaker	legacy	Commercial text-to-speech service, largely sold to publishers to add read-aloud to their own websites and products.	cloud-API	?		Proprietary, c	L
remiforall/dys-play	legacy	French PWA reading aid for dyslexic users combining local OCR, speech synthesis, adapted fonts and a stated zero-data-collection design. [lang: French	local-only	active	0	AGPL-3.0	M
Remmina	legacy	GTK remote-desktop client for RDP, VNC, SPICE, X2Go, SSH and plain HTTP; its RDP plugin carries a clipboard structure (rf_clipboard) in the published	local-only	active		GPL-2.0-or-lat	M
RFB / RFC 6143 ServerCutText + Extended Clipboard pseudo-encodin	legacy	The VNC wire protocol carries selection text, not only pixels: RFC 6143 section 7.6.4 ServerCutText says 'The server has new ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) text	unknown	active		IETF RFC (Info	M
Rhasspy (v2) and Rhasspy 3	legacy	'Offline private voice assistant for many human languages' [vendor] — carried an HTTP TTS API alongside STT and intent handling; the v3 rewrite is a s	local-only	archived	2	MIT	M
Robust Annotation of Mobile Application Interfaces in Methods fo	legacy	Methods for identifying the same screen and the same element across app versions, so accessibility annotations attached by third parties survive inter	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
Saladict / 沙拉查词 · 沙拉翻译 · Read Frog 陪读蛙 · DualRead	legacy	Chinese-market select-a-word dictionary and translation extensions covering 中英日韩法德西 with pronunciation playback; the reading is a pronunciation featur	hybrid	active		mixed	L
Say It	legacy	Free browser page that OCRs an uploaded or drawn image and speaks the recognized text.	local-only	?		not verified	V
Scanning for Digital Content: How Blind and Sighted People Perce	legacy	Journal extension testing the concurrent-speech scanning result across both blind and sighted listeners.	local-only	dormant		n/a (study)	M
Scanning Pens Ltd	legacy	The distributor that puts C-Pen hardware into UK/EU/US schools and workplaces — the reason C-Pen appears under several storefront names.	unknown	commercial-l		n/a	L
Screen Point-and-Read (Tree-of-Lens agent)	legacy	Research system for the 'ScreenPR' task: given a screenshot and a point the user indicates, a multimodal LLM agent reads out the content at that point	local-only	?	31	see repo	M
Screen Point-and-Read / Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent — Fan et al., a	legacy	Research system defining the 'ScreenPR' task — given a screenshot plus a point the user indicated, generate a spoken-style description of the content	hybrid	dormant	31	see repo	M
Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile A	legacy	On-device model that detects UI elements from an iOS app's rendered pixels and generates accessibility metadata to feed VoiceOver where the app suppli	local-only	active		not released (	M
Screen2AX — Muryn et al., arXiv:2507.16704 (MacPaw)	legacy	Framework that builds a tree-structured macOS accessibility hierarchy from a single screenshot using vision-language and object-detection models, to s	local-only	active	32	see repo	M
ScreenTrack — Hu & Lee, CHI 2020	legacy	Software that screenshots the computer at regular intervals and turns the capture history into a time-lapse the user scrubs to find and re-open a docu	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
SelectON (emvaized/selecton-extension)	legacy	Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that shows a configurable popup with actions whenever text is selected on a page.	local-only	active	128	NOASSERTION	M
selsync (Stoica-Mihai)	legacy	C daemon that mirrors PRIMARY into CLIPBOARD by speaking ext-data-control-v1, wlr-data-control v2 or X11 XFIXES directly (no wl-copy/xclip subprocess)	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
shotkey (phenax)	legacy	Small X hotkey daemon with modes and key chords.	local-only	active	47	MIT	M
Sikuli — Yeh, Chang & Miller, UIST 2009	legacy	Search and automation of graphical interfaces by screenshot: take a picture of a button or icon, and use that image both as a help-system query and as	local-only	dormant		research relea	M
Slide Rule — Kane, Bigham & Wobbrock, ASSETS 2008	legacy	Audio-based multi-touch interaction techniques that made a touch screen usable without sight — the ancestor of the touch-explore-then-confirm pattern	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
speakable (tollwerk)	legacy	Simple, privacy-friendly on-page screen-reader / TTS player built on the native browser Web Speech API.	local-only	?	24	see repo	L
speakers (OneNoted)	legacy	Local Linux TTS daemon plus a Speech Dispatcher bridge built on Qwen3-TTS, in Rust; targets Hyprland/niri/Wayland.	local-only	?	3	none declared	M
Speech Dispatcher network mode (SPEECHD_ADDRESS=inet_socket:HOST	legacy	The shipped spd-say man page documents 'SPEECHD_ADDRESS ... specifies TCP endpoint where speech-dispatcher is listening and to which spd-say should co	local-only	active		GPL-2.0-or-lat	M
Speech Kit for Obsidian (brittain9/speech-kit-obsidian-plugin)	legacy	Combined dictation, transcription, translation and note-listening plugin for Obsidian with a managed local model catalog (formerly Local Dictation).	hybrid	?	11	MIT	M
SpeechCore / UniversalSpeech / Tolk	legacy	Three older screen-reader abstraction libraries — the prior art that PRISM sets out to unify, still embedded in many accessible games and apps on Wind	local-only	dormant	104	varies per pro	L
speechd-el (brailcom/speechd-el)	legacy	Emacs speech and Braille output interface that routes Emacs output to Speech Dispatcher.	local-only	?	16	GPL-3.0	M
Speechify	legacy/mac	Commercial cross-platform reading product (web, mobile, browser extension) with an OCR path for scanned/printed text.	cloud-API	?		Proprietary, f	L
speechify.nvim (HmZyy)	legacy	'speechify powered text-to-speech inside Neovim' [vendor, repo description] — editor-scoped read-aloud for the current buffer/selection.	hybrid	active	1	not read	V
SPICE VD_AGENT clipboard (spice-vdagent agent protocol)	legacy	SPICE's guest-agent protocol carries clipboard text both ways with a symmetric GRAB / RELEASE / REQUEST / CLIPBOARD message set, VD_AGENT_CLIPBOARD_UT	unknown	active		SPICE project	M
splash-damage (insidewhy)	legacy	Keyboard remapper daemon for Wayland via evdev/uinput with per-app exclusions.	local-only	active	0	none	M
Stormux (Linux for the blind on Raspberry Pi)	legacy	Accessible Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi presented at a German accessibility event; a sibling of the accessible-distro class already catalogued	local-only	unknown		open source	L
SUGILITE — Li, Azaria & Myers, CHI 2017	legacy	Programming-by-demonstration system that automates arbitrary Android apps through the accessibility API, generalising a script from a single spoken co	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
sxhkd (baskerville)	legacy	X11 hotkey daemon: binds chords to shell commands via XGrabKey. X11 only. On Wayland it has no equivalent grab, which is the constraint recorded in th	local-only	active	2951	BSD-2-Clause	M
Tailo	legacy	Study-support tool carried on the DSA approved list in two categories, OCR and Research.	cloud-API	commercial-l		Commercial sub	L
Talkify	legacy	JavaScript text-to-speech library with text highlighting, for embedding reading into web pages.	hybrid	?	240	none declared	M
Task Mode: Dynamic Filtering for Task-Specific Web Navigation us	legacy	System that uses an LLM to filter a web page down to the elements relevant to a stated goal, so a screen-reader user does not traverse minutes of irre	hybrid	active		unknown	M
tesseract.js	legacy	Pure-JavaScript/WASM OCR for 100+ languages; the engine behind browser and Electron OCR tools such as scr-ocr.	local-only	?	39	Apache-2.0	M
Text-to-speeches: Evaluating the Perception of Concurrent Speech	legacy	Earlier experiment in the same line, testing whether blind listeners can pick out the relevant channel among two, three or four simultaneous speech st	local-only	dormant		n/a (study)	M
Texthelp OrbitNote	legacy	Browser-based PDF workspace from Texthelp with read-aloud and annotation, bundled on the DSA list alongside EquatIO.	cloud-API	commercial-l		Commercial sub	M
Texthelp ReachDeck (formerly Browsealoud)	legacy	Website-owner-deployed accessibility toolbar that speaks page content to visitors; the reading capability is bought by the site publisher, not install	cloud-API	commercial-l		Commercial sub	M
TextyMcSpeechy	legacy	Toolkit for training custom Piper voice models from your own recordings or RVC voices, offline and even on a Raspberry Pi.	local-only	?	697	see repo	L
The accessibility of digital technologies for people with visual	legacy	Scoping review of first-hand accessibility experiences of blind and visually impaired users of digital technology, organised against the WCAG guidelin	unknown	active		open access (C	M
The Impact of Element Ordering on LM Agent Performance — Zhang e	legacy	Study of how much the ORDER in which on-screen elements are presented matters when an agent has only pixels and no hierarchy to inherit an order from.	unknown	active		unknown	M
The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader	legacy	First-hand January 2026 evaluation by a screen-reader user who built NVDA add-ons for Supertonic and Kitten TTS and documents why modern neural TTS fa	local-only	?		CC0 1.0	M
Thorium Reader (edrlab/thorium-reader)	legacy/mac/lin	Cross-platform Readium-based EPUB reading app whose stated accessibility approach is to work WITH NVDA, JAWS or Narrator rather than to embed its own	local-only	?	2818	BSD-3-Clause	M
Thunder-RJ (RJ Cooper & Associates)	legacy	Rebadged distribution of the free Thunder Windows screen reader offered by a US assistive-technology reseller.	local-only	active		Free/low-cost	M
TTS Arena V2 (TTS-AGI)	legacy	Crowd-sourced blind A/B benchmark for TTS models with an Elo leaderboard, on Hugging Face Spaces.	cloud-API	?		see Space	M
tts-wrapper (willwade)	legacy	Unified Python interface over many online and offline TTS engines, with a documented feature matrix covering streaming and word-boundary events per en	hybrid	?	39	MIT	M
TTSReader for Obsidian (sundy-li/obsidian-ttsreader)	legacy	Obsidian plugin that reads the selection, the current note, or pasted text, with a 'Read the selected text' command in the palette and the editor righ	hybrid	?	0	MIT	M
TTSVoicesAvailable (AceCentre)	legacy	Small API (plus a Streamlit front-end) that enumerates the TTS voices available across providers, including offline voices.	hybrid	?	1	open source (A	L
Understanding Blind and Low Vision Users' Attitudes Towards Spat	legacy	Formative study with a custom desktop screen reader that adds spatial input and output to web navigation, and a report on how blind and low-vision use	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
US state AT Act lending-library catalogues (TechOWL/myatprogram,	legacy	Network of state Assistive Technology Act programmes that lend software and devices for trial before purchase; TechOWL alone states its Pennsylvania l	unknown	active		US government-	L
vim-oscyank	legacy	'A Vim plugin to copy text through SSH with OSC52' [vendor] — makes an editor yank inside a remote session land on the local clipboard.	local-only	active	740	BSD-2-Clause	M
vim-piper	legacy	Vim plugin that speaks buffer or selected text through Piper.	local-only	?	29	see repo	L
Virtual Screen Reader (guidepup)	legacy	A simulated screen reader implemented in JavaScript for unit-testing accessibility, with no real assistive technology involved.	local-only	?	400	MIT	L
VizLens — Guo et al., UIST 2016	legacy	Mobile application that lets a blind user photograph a physical interface (microwave, kiosk, thermostat), has crowd workers label it once, then speaks	hybrid	dormant		research proto	M
VMware / Omnissa Horizon clipboard redirection (client-side bloc	legacy	Horizon's client GPO catalogue exposes a setting described as 'Whether block clipboard redirection to client side when client doesn't support audit' —	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary (O	L
Voicing (ainure-git/voicing)	legacy	VS Code extension that reads SELECTED TERMINAL OUTPUT aloud at ~2x with pause/stop, using the OS local voice, plus dictation into the terminal.	os-native	?	1	MIT	M
Vorleser XL (in-media KG / MEDIAKG)	legacy	German commercial Vorleseprogramm marketed for reading PDF, Word, ePub, web pages, e-mails and plain text and for converting them to MP3; a distributo	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	V
VSCode Read Aloud Text (azu/vscode-read-aloud-text)	legacy	VS Code extension that speaks the whole document, from the cursor, or just the selection, using OS TTS, and highlights the text currently being read.	os-native	?	15	MIT	M
Wayland cross-application selection read - the privileged-operat	legacy	On Wayland, reading another application's selection from a background process is a privileged operation, not a normal one. wl-clipboard's man page BUG	os-native	active			M
wayland-clipboard-listener (Decodetalkers)	legacy	Rust library and CLI that emits an event on every Wayland clipboard or PRIMARY change via the data-control protocols.	local-only	active	15	GPL-3.0	M
web-speech-recommended-voices (Readium)	legacy	Curated data set of recommended voices for the Web Speech API, per language and platform.	local-only	?	65	see repo	L
WebAnywhere — Bigham, Prince & Ladner, W4A 2008	legacy	Screen reader that ran inside the browser with nothing installed on the machine, so a blind user could get speech on a computer that was not theirs.	hybrid	dormant		open-source re	M
What Frustrates Screen Reader Users on the Web: A Study of 100 B	legacy	Survey and time-diary study of what actually goes wrong for screen-reader users, and how much of their working time it costs.	unknown	dormant		n/a (study)	L
Windows App (Microsoft) — macOS client, formerly Microsoft Remot	legacy/win/web	Microsoft's own cross-platform feature matrix marks 'Clipboard - bidirectional' supported on macOS and describes it as 'Redirect the clipboard on the	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (f	M
Wisp AI Assistant (SunnyLich)	legacy	'Wisp - A hotkey-driven AI overlay for your desktop. Press a key, pick an intent, and Wisp reads the right context, then streams an answer' [vendor, r	hybrid	active	8	not read	V
wl-clipboard-rs (YaLTeR)	legacy	Rust reimplementation of the wl-clipboard logic as a library plus wl-clip-persist-style binaries; speaks the data-control protocols directly instead o	local-only	active	507	Apache-2.0	M
wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 (Wayland protocol)	legacy	The wlroots-originated predecessor of ext-data-control, same purpose (privileged clipboard/PRIMARY read by an unfocused client); still the version man	os-native	active		MIT-style (pro	M
Wood, Moxley, Tighe & Wagner (2018) — 'Does Use of Text-to-Speec	legacy	Meta-analysis of studies testing whether text-to-speech and read-aloud tools improve reading comprehension for students with reading difficulties.	unknown	active		paywalled (SAG	M
wtype	legacy	'xdotool type for wayland' - the wlroots-compositor route for synthetic typing, named as the sway/Hyprland option in Handy's paste-methods documentati	local-only	active	549	MIT	M
Wyoming protocol (OHF-Voice/wyoming, formerly rhasspy/wyoming)	legacy	'Peer-to-peer protocol for voice assistants' [vendor] — a JSONL-over-TCP framing used to expose TTS (and STT/wake-word) services as network endpoints	local-only	active	387	MIT	M
wyoming-satellite	legacy	'Remote voice satellite using Wyoming protocol' [vendor] — a thin networked audio endpoint that plays synthesised speech on a device separate from the	local-only	archived	1	MIT	M
wyoming_openai	legacy	'OpenAI-Compatible Proxy Middleware for the Wyoming Protocol' [vendor] — bridges Wyoming clients to any OpenAI-shaped speech endpoint.	hybrid	active	204	Apache-2.0	M
xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for COSMIC. Its src/ directory contains access.rs, app.rs, buffer.rs, documents.rs, file_chooser.rs, screencast.rs and s	os-native	active	102		M
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for GNOME / Mutter. GlobalShortcuts is tracked as work item 47 in the GNOME GitLab project; a GNOME Discourse thread sta	os-native	active			L
xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for Hyprland. Its src/portals directory contains GlobalShortcuts.cpp, InputCapture.cpp, Screencopy.cpp and Screenshot.cp	os-native	active	473		M
xdg-desktop-portal-kde	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for KDE Plasma / KWin. Its src/ directory contains globalshortcuts.cpp, inputcapture.cpp, remotedesktop.cpp, screencast.	os-native	active	83		M
xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for LXQt. Interface coverage not inspected.	os-native	active	31		L
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr	legacy	Per-compositor portal backend for wlroots compositors (Sway, river and relatives). Its README states 'Currently it only implements the following porta	os-native	active	725		M
xdotool (jordansissel)	legacy	X11 fake keyboard/mouse input and window management; the tool a shell-script selection reader uses to synthesise Ctrl+C.	local-only	active	3837	BSD-3-Clause	M
Xpra (persistent remote applications for X11; shadow mode for X1	legacy	Remote-application/screen-sharing system whose usage docs list clipboard and audio as independently switchable forwarded features, with documented inv	local-only	active	2	GPL-2.0	M
XuGaoFeng-Victor/mcp-point-reader	legacy	An MCP server that captures text via the clipboard and screenshots and offers translation and text-to-speech over it. [lang: Chinese + English descrip	hybrid	unknown	2	unknown	L
Zoomax low-vision devices with OCR read-aloud	legacy	Chinese low-vision magnifier maker whose devices include an OCR-to-speech function; the budget end of the reading-hardware market.	local-only	unknown		Commercial har	L
Zotero TTS Reader (zcyisiee/zotero-tts-reader)	legacy	Zotero 7 plugin that speaks text you select in Zotero's PDF reader through the OpenAI TTS API, with citation stripping and a side-panel player.	cloud-API	?	5	none declared	M
Zotero-TTS-Plugin (Echo-Lian)	legacy	A second, separate Zotero plugin adding a TTS function to the reference manager.	unknown	?	0	none declared	L
Edge read-aloud endpoint reuse cluster (CN): guozhigq/ReadAloud	web/win/mac/lin	Chinese-language projects that wrap Microsoft Edge's 大声朗读 speech endpoint: a PWA front end (138 stars), a Cloudflare-Workers/Vercel/Docker HTTP forwar	cloud-API	active	229	mixed open sou	M
Speechify / ElevenReader / Matter / VocalVia / Readox (Product H	web	Product Hunt's text-to-speech category page as captured in round 1, naming eight commercial products (ElevenLabs, Murf AI, Matter, VocalVia, Cartesia,	unknown	unknown		n/a (directory	L
vocodex (C043)	web	Work-in-progress self-hostable TTS client, surfaced by a 'like Speechify' README search.	local-only	dormant	22	MIT	L
a-haute-voix (LaPelle)	?	French accessibility tool described as extracting text from a PDF and re-rendering it for easier reading.	unknown	unknown	0	unknown	L
TuxReader (Savannah)	?	Savannah non-GNU project registered as 'TuxReader'; name and hosting confirmed by the Savannah software search, description not retrievable in this pa	unknown	unknown		unknown	L

catalogue-core.md

Catalogue — Reads the screen or the selection — owns acquisition and a human trigger

448 entries. Evidence tier: M measured (source read) · V vendor claim · L lead, unverified · D derived.

Acq = acquisition mechanism. Clipboard = does reading a selection clobber your clipboard. Superlatives appearing in these cells sit inside attributed quotations; the catalogue does not rank.

Tool	Plat	Acq	Clipboard	Trigger	Runtime	Status	Stars	Licence	Ev
Android Select to Speak	and	AX-sel	no	2-finger swipe up (3-finger if Tal	os-native	active		Proprietary; s	M
Android TalkBack	and	follow-focus	no	install the APK, then toggle the T	os-native	active	512	Apache-2.0	M
ChromeOS Select-to-speak and Android Select to Speak	and	AX-sel	no	Select-to-Speak button in the stat	os-native	active		proprietary (b	V
Jieshuo (Commentary) screen reader	and	OCR-full	?	touch gestures on the Android devi	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, f	V
Lector (diet103)	and	OCR-region	no	'Read aloud (Lector)' in the selec	hybrid	active	0	Apache-2.0	M
orionAIScreenReader	and	OCR-full	no	floating 'Read Screen' button over	cloud-API	active	16	MIT	M
Sonata (Arkadia-Oversoul-Prism)	and	AX-sel	no	the Android system text-selection	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
SpeakTouch	and	follow-focus	no	enabled once as an Android accessi	os-native	active	9	GPL-3.0	M
Talk Forward (Yannick Plassiard)	and	follow-focus	no	explore-by-touch plus one- and two	local-only	active	1	proprietary —	M
Talk Forward (Yannick Plassiard)	and	follow-focus	no	?	local-only	active		free	V
TalkBack (DivestOS / divested-mobile fork on Codeberg)	and	follow-focus	no	Android accessibility-service gest	os-native	archived	2	not set on the	M
TalkBack FOSS (talkback-foss-team)	and	follow-focus	no	Android AccessibilityService - exp	local-only	active	35	Apache-2.0	M
TTS Util (drmfinlay)	and	clip-watch	no	launcher shortcuts and in-app butt	local-only	active	191	Apache-2.0	M
TTS Util (F-Droid)	and	clip-watch	no	In-app buttons for retrieving comm	local-only	active	191	Apache-2.0	M
天坦读屏 (Tatans / Tiantan Screen Reader)	and	follow-focus	?	touch gestures with customisable g	local-only	active	60,000	proprietary	V
点明读屏 / 点明安卓 (Dianming, 深圳点明软件)	and	follow-focus	?	Android accessibility-service gest	local-only	active		Proprietary (f	L
샤인플러스 / Shine Plus (에이티랩 / ATLab)	and	follow-focus	?	gesture and physical-key shortcuts	local-only	dormant	22,800	proprietary	V
copy-to-speech	Wl/X11	AX-sel	no	user-assigned desktop keyboard sho	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
GameVox (repository formerly named GameReader)	Wl	OCR-region	no	Two human triggers documented: a c	local-only	dormant	1	none declared	M
GameVox / GameReader	Wl	OCR-region	no	Configurable gamepad button, or a	local-only	active	1	no licence fil	M
Karrot (KDE Desktop Environment Narrator)	Wl	OCR-region	yes	two hotkeys the user binds themsel	local-only	dormant	0	MIT (GitHub mi	M
Narro — Read Selection Aloud	Wl	AX-sel	no	Ctrl+\ = --primary (read the prima	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
read-selection-tts	Wl	AX-sel	no	Ctrl+Alt+R read, Ctrl+Alt+S pause,	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	M
Text to Speech - Piper Reader (GNOME Shell extension)	Wl	clip-watch	no	Shift+Super+A by default, editable	local-only	active	0	MIT (stated in	M
VocalPlasma	Wl	AX-sel	no	Alt+Esc, written into ~/.config/kg	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
wayread-clipboard-speaker	Wl	clip-watch	no	speaks automatically on each new c	local-only	active	0	MPL-2.0	M
AverVOX	X11/Wl	?	?	Ctrl+Alt+S (read selected text alo	local-only	commercial-l	0	MIT (free OSS	V
clipboard-speaker (GitLab mirrors: kakafarm/clipboard-speaker, y	X11	AX-sel	no	user-assigned desktop keyboard sho	local-only	archived	0	none declared	M
clipboard-speaker / guile-clipboard-speaker (Yuval Langer)	X11	clip-watch	no	a keybinding the user defines in t	local-only	active	1	unknown — no l	M
Crow Translate	X11/Wl/win	copy-sel	yes	Global hotkeys: Ctrl+Alt+S speak s	cloud-API	archived	1982	GPL-3.0	M
Cthulhu (Orca fork)	X11/Wl	follow-focus	no	runs continuously as a screen read	local-only	active	0	LGPL-2.1 (COPY	M
diamondburned/clipboard_reader-translator	X11	clip-watch	no	run ./readtrans after copying; t	cloud-API	dormant	1	none declared	M
espeak-scripts (ZarthKa)	X11	AX-sel	no	None shipped - the author states '	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-3.0	M
gnome-speak-selection	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	Super+Shift+K speak, Super+Shift+L	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
HockEye (PoeticKiler)	X11	OCR-region	no	Numlock, then drag to select any s	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
lexaloud (Gustavjiversen01)	X11/Wl	clip-watch	no	user presses Ctrl+C themselves, th	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
Light Dict (GNOME Shell extension)	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	acts on the primary selection as y	local-only	active	40	GPL-3.0	M
LightRead	X11	AX-sel	no	Two X11 root-window key grabs regi	local-only	dormant	0	MIT	M
ocrdesktop	X11	OCR-region	no	no built-in hotkey — the manual in	local-only	active	20	not declared (	M
OCRdesktop	X11	OCR-full	no	The ArchWiki instruction is explic	local-only	unknown		not verified	M
Orca	X11/Wl	follow-focus	no	keyboard commands built on the Orc	local-only	active	33	LGPL-2.1	M
Piper Highlight (impermanent-cc/piper_highlight)	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	hotkey that reads the X11/Wayland	local-only	active	0	NOASSERTION	M
PRIMARY-only recipe (xsel | espeak) - clipboard left untouche	X11	clip-watch	no	a desktop keyboard shortcut the us	local-only	active		n/a - this is	M
PRIMARY-to-CLIPBOARD bridge recipe (xclip primary -> xclip clipb	X11	AX-sel	yes	a desktop keyboard shortcut whose	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
readaloud (StellaTerra)	X11/Wl	clip-watch	no	a desktop keyboard shortcut the us	local-only	active	0	GPL-3.0	M
ReadClip	X11	clip-watch	no	none beyond leaving the script run	local-only	dormant	1	GPL-3.0	M
ReadClip recipe - xclip -o | espeak on a GNOME custom shortcu	X11	AX-sel	no	a custom keyboard shortcut created	local-only	active		CC-BY-SA (answ	M
screenshot-text-to-speech (KDE)	X11/Wl	OCR-region	no	Pause/Break key — an Xlib daemon g	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
Select Reader (MaurerKrisztian)	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	a floating play button appears nea	local-only	active	0	not declared (	M
selection-tts-app (mishrasubhransu)	X11	AX-sel	no	Ctrl+R by default, installed as a	cloud-API	dormant	0	none declared	M
Speak Selection (GNOME Shell extension)	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	Super+Shift+K speaks the selection	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
speak-selection (HyperCactus/speak-selection)	X11/Wl/mac/win	clip-watch	no	a shortcut the user creates per pl	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
speak-selection (nico-schluter)	X11/Wl	AX-sel	no	No key is bound out of the box. in	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Speech Note (dsnote)	X11/Wl	clip-watch	no	Settings -> Accessibility -> 'Use	local-only	active	1558	MPL-2.0	M
sttts	X11	OCR-region	no	launch uv run python capture.py,	local-only	active	2	none declared	V
SVaiva/tools — linux/screen-ocr	X11/Wl	OCR-region	yes	global hotkeys via the rdev listen	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
tts-reader (dipta10)	X11/Wl/win	AX-sel	no	none is shipped — the daemon expos	local-only	active	14	GPL-3.0	M
tts-reader (mhazoglou)	X11	copy-sel	yes	F9 while the binary is running in	local-only	dormant	1	none declared	M
urxvt-espeak (grepsuzette)	X11	AX-sel	no	automatic on selection by default;	local-only	dormant	1	none declared	M
xsel/xclip + espeak-ng | spd-say one-liner (Linux shell recipe	X11	AX-sel	yes	a custom desktop keyboard shortcut	local-only	active		the article's	M
yapper (maelguimet)	X11	AX-sel	no	Super+Shift+S reads the selection	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Yggdrasil (albertotirla fork of Odilia)	X11/Wl	follow-focus	no	resident screen reader driven by k	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-3.0	D
BRLTTY	lin/win/and	follow-focus	no	Buttons and routing keys on the br	local-only	active	121	LGPL-2.1	M
clipboard-reader (drhodes)	lin	clip-watch	no	clipboard-driven (the user's own c	local-only	active	0	GPL-3.0	V
ClipSpeak	lin	clip-watch	no	tray menu entry 'Pronounce (Clipbo	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
Ergo Vox	lin	follow-focus	no	runs as a service and follows focu	local-only	dormant	1	GPL-3.0	M
Fenrir	lin/mac/win	follow-focus	no	Keyboard, through one of two input	local-only	dormant	57	LGPL-3.0	M
FrontPocket (markd89)	lin/mac	clip-watch	no	invoked to read the current clipbo	local-only	active	6	MIT	V
Gnopernicus	lin	follow-focus	?	unknown - not described on the Lau	local-only	dormant		LGPL-2.1 (Laun	D
GR for UNIX (grunix)	lin	follow-focus	no	?	local-only	dormant		proprietary	M
GR for UNIX (grunix)	lin	?	?	unknown - the project's own page i	local-only	archived		unknown	L
JSpeak	lin	clip-watch	no	in-app scan toggle button (diamond	local-only	active	16	GPL-3.0	M
lazy-reader-nix (timfewi)	lin	?	?	hotkeys declared through the NixOS	hybrid	active	0	MIT	V
LightRead (lightread-tts)	lin	?	?	Ctrl-z, per the project's own Laun	local-only	dormant		MIT / X / Expa	V
linux-tts-reader (mjakal)	lin	clip-watch	no	clipboard-driven	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	V
LIOS 3 (Linux Intelligent OCR Solution)	lin	OCR-region	no	in-app menu items ('Take and Recog	local-only	dormant	5	GPL-3.0 (state	M
nvda-linux (abdulazizsalimov fork of NVDA)	lin/win	follow-focus	no	resident screen reader (inherited	local-only	active	1	NOASSERTION (u	L
Odilia	lin	follow-focus	no	runs as a desktop process started	local-only	active	167	MIT OR Apache-	M
sirvim.nvim	lin	doc	—	Ctrl+Space stops speech; a	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Speakup	lin	follow-focus	no	numeric-keypad review commands; ru	local-only	active		GPL-2.0 (Linux	M
speakup + espeakup	lin/hl	follow-focus	no	speakup's own console review keys	local-only	active	39	GPL-3.0 (espea	M
SpectreTTS (Spectral-Kaburu)	lin	?	?	global hotkey over the highlighted	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
YASR (Yet Another Screen Reader)	lin/hl	follow-focus	—	launched as a wrapper around a she	local-only	dormant		GPL-2.0	L
2nd Speech Center (Zero2000 Software)	win	clip-watch	no	resident player window watching th	local-only	dormant		proprietary sh	V
95Reader (95リーダー)	win	?	?	unknown — the only source read is	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
AACSpeakHelper (AceCentre)	win	clip-watch	no	No global hotkey. AACSpeakHelperSe	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
ahk-clipboard-tts	win	copy-sel	yes	Ctrl+Enter (^Enter:: in the scri	os-native	dormant	1	none declared	M
aivis-clipboard-reader (ohtori222)	win/mac/lin	clip-watch	no	passive clipboard monitor; each co	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
Alinea / Alinea Cloud (Sensotec)	win/ext/web/ios/and	doc	?	in-suite reading toolbar / browser	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial (Le	M
araiai9801/yomiage	win	copy-sel	yes	Global hotkeys via RegisterHotKey	cloud-API	active	1	none declared	M
Assorted small clipboard-TTS implementations (Go/Rust/Python/C#)	win/mac/lin	clip-watch	no	varies by repo: jorkle's README in	hybrid	active	0	mixed: jorkle/	M
ATbar for Windows (desktop edition)	win/ext	clip-watch	no	the user's own Ctrl+C (the tool sp	local-only	dormant		free of charge	M
AutoHotkey SAPI.SpVoice recipe class	win	copy-sel	yes	User-defined AutoHotkey hotkey; th	os-native	active		Forum snippets	M
AutoHotkey SAPI.SpVoice sentence-splitting clipboard recipe	win	copy-sel	yes	Ctrl+W (^w::) as written in both	local-only	dormant	2	n/a (forum pos	M
Balabolka	win	clip-watch	no	system tray controls or global hot	os-native	commercial-l		Freeware (prop	M
bijiofzxx/clipear	win/ios	clip-watch	no	Ctrl+Shift+S to push and read; Ctr	hybrid	active	0	none declared	M
brandless-tts-desktop (gionin)	win/lin	?	?	unread	unknown	active	0	none declared	L
Capture2Text	win	OCR-region	yes	global hotkeys: Windows+Q box OCR,	local-only	dormant	,	GPL-3.0 (Sourc	M
ClaroRead (Everway, formerly Claro Software / Texthelp group)	win/mac/ext	OCR-region	?	Not published on the product page.	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
ClaroRead (Screen Capture / Scan Screen)	win/mac/ext	OCR-region	?	buttons on the ClaroRead toolbar;	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
ClintReads	win	copy-sel	yes	Ctrl+Shift+Space, plus separate de	local-only	active		proprietary, f	V
Clipboard-TTS-V1 (leytonoday)	win/mac/lin	clip-watch	no	no hotkey documented — the residen	cloud-API	archived	0	none declared	M
clipspeak (taichuyt)	win	clip-watch	no	run the script (bindable to a shor	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
cliptalk	win	clip-watch	no	no hotkey — copying text to the cl	hybrid	active	0	GPL-3.0	M
COBRA (BAUM Retec AG, now VisioBraille GmbH)	win	follow-focus	?	unknown — no source read describes	local-only	discontinued		proprietary	D
Connect OutLoud (Henter-Joyce / Freedom Scientific)	win	follow-focus	?	Not documented in any source I cou	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
CoolSpeech (ByteCool Software / Ziyuan Yao)	win	clip-watch	no	resident player window; copying te	local-only	discontinued		proprietary sh	M
CopySpeak (ilyaizen)	win	clip-watch	no	double-copy inside a 1.5 s window	hybrid	active	8	MIT	M
CSRA (LeonardoBlancoSerna fork of NVDA)	win	follow-focus	no	resident screen reader with NVDA's	local-only	active	0	NOASSERTION (G	L
Dolphin HAL / SuperNova / LunarPlus (and the Dolphin Pen)	win	follow-focus	?	unknown — the page read is a produ	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary co	D
Dolphin ScreenReader (standalone product)	win	follow-focus	no	Keyboard exploration of the screen	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial. GB	M
Dolphin ScreenReader / SuperNova	win	OCR-full	?	?	local-only	?		proprietary, p	V
Dolphin ScreenReader / SuperNova	win	follow-focus	no	keyboard commands driving a follow	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
Easydict Windows port + Raycast-Easydict	win/mac	copy-sel	yes	Windows port: floating pop button	hybrid	active	63	GPL-3.0 (easyd	M
f5-tts-hotkey	win	copy-sel	yes	Alt+X global hotkey (Windows Regis	local-only	active	1	not declared (	M
FocusTalk (フォーカストーク)	win	follow-focus	?	Its own screen-reader key commands	local-only	dormant		Proprietary (a	V
free-clipboard-reader-for-text-help (calebbyersschool-crypto)	win	OCR-region	?	ShareX capture hotkey feeding OCR,	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
Freedom Scientific Fusion (winget)	win	follow-focus	no	JAWS layered keystrokes — INSERT+S	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary (m	M
g-narrator	win	OCR-region	no	ALT+A+1 launches Region mode (then	local-only	dormant	4	MIT	M
Game Voice Reader	win	OCR-region	?	hold F10 (remappable by running 'R	hybrid	dormant	1	MIT	M
game-reader (baylic)	win	OCR-region	no	hotkey-triggered OCR capture over	local-only	active	1	none declared	V
GameReader	win	OCR-region	?	?	local-only	?	23	none declared	M
GameTextReader	win	OCR-region	no	Per-area configuration: 'Auto Read	hybrid	active	15	none declared	M
Ghotit Real Writer & Reader	win/mac	?	?	the Reading Button on the Ghotit F	hybrid	commercial-l		commercial; DS	V
Herald Pro	win	OCR-region	?	Global hotkeys, all reconfigurable	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary; t	V
HighlightLogger (nodeblackbox/highlightedtextfocusedlogger)	win	AX-sel	no	Alt+R in v4/v5 and Ctrl+R in v3, r	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
hover-translate	win	OCR-region	no	hold Ctrl (configurable to Alt or	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
HoverSpeak	win/mac/lin/ext	DOM	?	?	local-only	?		proprietary (f	V
icecream2015p/OCR-Read	win	OCR-region	no	System-tray menu item 'スクリーンショット取得	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-3.0	M
Image TTS (Microsoft Store)	win	OCR-region	no	system-tray resident app; the user	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary (M	V
IVONA MiniReader	win	?	?	Ctrl+Shift+Space, or the Play butt	local-only	discontinued		freeware (disc	M
IVONA MiniReader	win	?	?	Play button on the floating toolba	local-only	discontinued		proprietary fr	M
iZoom Magnifier / Reader (Issist Assistive Technologies)	win	follow-focus	?	unknown - no vendor documentation	local-only	dormant		Commercial, pe	D
JAWS (Freedom Scientific)	win	follow-focus	?	JAWS-key modifier command set (Ins	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary (c	D
JAWS (Job Access With Speech), Freedom Scientific / Vispero	win	follow-focus	?	A large keyboard command set built	os-native	commercial-l		Proprietary, p	L
Kokoro Clipboard TTS	win/mac	clip-watch	no	Super+Shift+Q on Windows, Control+	local-only	active	9	MIT stated in	M
Lingit (Lingdys / Lingright)	win/mac/ext/ios	?	?	floating toolbar ('verktoylinja')	hybrid	commercial-l		commercial; pe	V
LION Live OCR (NVDA add-on)	win	OCR-region	?	?	local-only	?		unknown	L
LION Live OCR (NVDA add-on)	win	OCR-full	no	NVDA+alt+n toggles the live OCR lo	local-only	active	4	GPL-2.0	M
LunaTranslator	win	OCR-region	?	floating always-on-top window with	hybrid	active	12659	GPL-3.0	M
LurkReader (the-secanto)	win	?	?	unread	local-only	active	0	none declared	L
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud (built-in browser feature)	win/mac/lin/and/ios	DOM	no	Settings and more menu > More tool	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (f	V
Microsoft Edge — Read Aloud	win/mac/lin/and/ios	DOM	?	?	hybrid	?		proprietary (f	V
Microsoft Edge — Read Aloud	win/mac/lin/and/ios	DOM	no	Settings and more > More tools > R	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (f	M
Microsoft Narrator, pre-Windows-10 form (Windows 2000 / XP / Vis	win	follow-focus	no	unknown - the cited Wikipedia arti	os-native	discontinued		proprietary, b	D
Mimir (MiniDraco)	win	clip-watch	?	tray app watching the clipboard, w	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
MOSpeech	win	clip-watch	no	Resident clipboard monitor - the u	local-only	dormant		freeware (Vect	M
mouse-tts (reverieline)	win	copy-sel	no	global mouse hook on a user-chosen	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
MWS Reader 5 (directINNOVATION UG)	win	OCR-region	?	Vendor text: 'The ComfortRead (OCR	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
MyFreeSpeech App Reader	win	AX-sel	yes	global hotkeys registered with the	local-only	active	1	GPL-3.0	M
NAO — NVDA Advanced OCR	win	OCR-full	no	NVDA+Shift+R OCRs the focused file	local-only	active	21	GPL-3.0	M
Natural-Voice-TTS (pawelpc)	win	?	?	global hotkey over the current sel	local-only	active	0	Apache-2.0	V
NeoPot (shirumesu fork of pot-desktop)	win/mac/lin	copy-sel	?	global hotkeys for selection-trans	hybrid	active	13	GPL-3.0	M
NVDA "Enhanced Clipboard Reading" add-on	win	clip-watch	no	?	local-only	active		unknown (NVDA	L
NVDA "Enhanced Clipboard Reading" add-on	win	clip-watch	no	NVDA+C (three quick presses opens	local-only	active	0	GPL-3.0	M
NVDA 'tesseractOCR' add-on	win	OCR-region	?	?	local-only	?		GPL-2.0 (NVDA	V
NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access)	win	follow-focus	no	NVDA+downArrow (desktop) / NVDA+a	os-native	active	2615	GPL-2.0 per th	M
NVDA Advanced OCR (NAO add-on)	win	OCR-full	no	NVDA gestures: NVDA+Shift+R (file/	local-only	active	21	GPL-3.0	M
NVDA Autoclip add-on	win	clip-watch	no	NVDA+Control+Shift+K toggles the w	local-only	active	10	GPL-2.0	M
NVDA built-in Remote Access (NVDA 2025.1+)	win	follow-focus	no	NVDA's own key commands plus a Rem	hybrid	active	,	GPL-2.0	M
NVDA OCR add-on (Tesseract-based)	win	OCR-region	no	NVDA+r, after moving to the target	local-only	dormant	2148	unknown (the a	M
nvda-ocr (Tesseract add-on for NVDA)	win	OCR-region	no	unknown - the archived README is t	local-only	archived	10	none declared	L
NVDA日本語版 (nvdajp)	win	follow-focus	no	runs continuously and speaks as fo	local-only	active	39	NOASSERTION pe	M
OCR_TextToSpeech (henrywerner)	win	OCR-region	no	Launch the script, then press Ctrl	local-only	dormant	2	none declared	M
OCRElevenLabs	win	OCR-region	no	ALT+SPACE global hotkey, or the in	hybrid	dormant	1	none declared	M
Orato	win	clip-watch	yes	Speak button in the Orato window a	local-only	dormant		Free of charge	M
PandaOCR.Pro (miaomiaosoft)	win	OCR-region	?	screenshot capture; the README nam	hybrid	active	1916	no licence fil	V
Panopreter Basic / Panopreter (Standard)	win	clip-watch	no	Standard edition: the user copies	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary; B	V
Panopreter Basic / Panopreter (Standard)	win/ext	clip-watch	no	the user's own Ctrl+C while 'Read	local-only	commercial-l		freeware (Basi	M
PC-Talker Neo / NetReader Neo (Kochi System Development)	win	follow-focus	?	Its own screen-reader key commands	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; th	V
Penfriend XL / XP / Portable	win	clip-watch	yes	Ctrl+C into the Penfriend Clipboar	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial, pe	M
piper-tts-hotkey (edvinklaebo)	win	clip-watch	no	Global hotkey ctrl+alt+s, set as t	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
piper_clipboard_tts (GustJc)	win/lin	clip-watch	no	the user's own Ctrl+C is the trigg	local-only	dormant	0	MIT	M
pocket-tray (jame25)	win	clip-watch	no	passive clipboard monitor - the us	local-only	active	1	none declared	M
PointRead (GenGu233)	win	AX-sel	no	global hotkeys, all reconfigurable	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Pot (pot-app/pot-desktop)	win/mac/X11/Wl	AX-sel	?	user-configured global shortcuts f	hybrid	active	19213	GPL-3.0	M
Pot Forge (aabiberyi-prog fork of pot-desktop)	win/mac/lin	copy-sel	?	Pot's global hotkeys for selection	hybrid	active	0	GPL-3.0	V
pot-desktop-with-OCR-translator (ClanTri fork)	win/mac/lin	OCR-region	?	Pot's hotkeys plus the added alway	hybrid	active	0	GPL-3.0	V
PRAA (fadhiilahahmadzikri)	win	OCR-region	?	global hotkey selecting between cl	hybrid	active	0	none declared	V
QTranslate (ahatem rewrite)	win	copy-sel	no	Ctrl+E listen to the selected text	cloud-API	active	125	MIT	M
qualquer-texto-para-voz (caiobuni)	win	clip-watch	?	hotkey over the selection or the c	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	V
quick_read (luntar)	win	clip-watch	no	passive clipboard monitor; the use	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
Read The Stupid Text	win	clip-watch	?	three modes: auto-on-selection, au	local-only	commercial-l	0	proprietary Mi	V
Read&Write (Texthelp / Everway)	win/mac/ext/ios	DOM	?	buttons on the floating Read&Write	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary su	V
Read&Write Screenshot Reader (Texthelp / Everway)	win/ext	OCR-region	?	A Screenshot Reader button on the	hybrid	commercial-l		Proprietary, s	V
read-aloud-tts-windows (LE-VAI)	win	copy-sel	no	Ctrl + right-click over the curren	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
read-aloud-windows (jwat1461)	win/ext	copy-sel	no	Ctrl+Alt+R reads the selection, Ct	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
Read4Me TTS Clipboard Reader	win	clip-watch	?	?	local-only	unknown		MIT (SF catego	V
Read4Me TTS Clipboard Reader	win	copy-sel	yes	Multiple user-configured global ho	local-only	dormant	4	MIT	M
Read4Me TTS Clipboard Reader (Yassen Dobrev)	win	clip-watch	no	user-configured hotkeys; multiple	local-only	dormant	4	MIT	M
Readable - Text Extractor (Sensory Software / Sensory Readable v	win	OCR-region	yes	Documented as a five-step manual s	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary (c	M
readallowedtts (digitaldingus)	win/mac/lin	DOM	no	Ctrl+Alt+S over the highlighted te	unknown	active	2	none declared	V
ReadClip (with Hotkeys Macros)	win	clip-watch	yes	left-click the ReadClip icon to pu	local-only	dormant		TTS reader fre	M
ReadPlease 2003 / ReadPlease PLUS (ReadPlease Corporation)	win	clip-watch	?	persistent on-screen player window	local-only	discontinued		freeware (Read	L
ReadToMe-TTS	win	copy-sel	yes	configurable global hotkey, defaul	local-only	active	2	not declared (	M
Readwave	win	?	?	One global hotkey, Ctrl+Alt+R, sta	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary; f	V
RigelA (雷革读屏)	win	follow-focus	no	unknown — a keyboard-driven screen	os-native	dormant	153	Apache-2.0	M
RightSpeak	win	?	?	Per the listing: the main app wind	unknown	commercial-l		Proprietary (M	V
Sayz Me	win	clip-watch	yes	its own GUI window (per the incomi	local-only	unknown		BSD (per the i	L
Sayz Me	win	clip-watch	no	an in-application control that rea	local-only	archived		BSD	M
Screen Read-Aloud (Z3n1thh/Speech)	win	OCR-region	no	Ctrl+Shift+R = '+ New' region capt	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
Simple TTS Reader	win	clip-watch	no	the user's own copy — any clipboar	local-only	active	0	unclear — Sour	M
Simple TTS Reader (SourceForge)	win	clip-watch	no	Tray-resident watcher - it speaks	local-only	active	85	Apache-2.0 (pe	M
SoftSpoken (Prateek-LN2002)	win	?	?	a floating play button that appear	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
speak-helper (archoor)	win/mac/lin	copy-sel	yes	Ctrl+Alt+R global hotkey (pynput G	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
speak-selected-text (AnaghAgarwal56)	win/mac/lin	clip-watch	no	the README's own two-step sequence	cloud-API	active	0	none declared	M
SpeakAnywhere	win	clip-watch	no	a '🔊 Speak Clipboard' label button	local-only	active	3	NOASSERTION (a	M
SpeakFlow (wangpeng76)	win	?	?	tray menu plus hotkeys over the se	hybrid	active	0	MIT	V
Speakonia (CFS-Technologies) and ReadPlease	win	clip-watch	no	ReadPlease speaks what you have co	local-only	discontinued		freeware, both	M
SpeakSelectedText (lucaspecina)	win/mac	copy-sel	yes	global hotkey, default ctrl+alt+l	cloud-API	active	0	none declared	M
SpeakShot	win	OCR-region	?	'Global hotkeys' [vendor]; no chor	unknown	unknown		Proprietary (a	V
SpeakText (jieme54)	win	copy-sel	no	hotkey over the current selection,	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
SprintPlus (Jabbla)	win/mac/web	?	?	Vendor sentence: 'Click on a word	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial (Ja	V
SteadyVoice	win	AX-sel	yes	Ctrl+Shift+R global hotkey; pressi	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
sttts	win/lin/mac	OCR-region	?	?	local-only	?		unknown	L
SuperNova / Dolphin ScreenReader	win	follow-focus	no	screen-reader keystrokes and the S	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
SuperNova Enterprise (Dolphin Computer Access)	win	follow-focus	?	not described on the requirements	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; se	V
supertonic-reader (Yxnt)	win/mac/lin	?	?	Ctrl+~ speaks the current selectio	local-only	active	1	none declared	M
System Access / System Access To Go (Serotek)	win	follow-focus	?	Screen-reader key commands; an ins	hybrid	dormant		Proprietary; t	L
Text Grab	win	OCR-region	yes	global hotkeys served by the optio	local-only	active	4852	MIT	M
Text-Grab-TTS (kmcnaught fork of TheJoeFin/Text-Grab)	win	OCR-region	?	Win+Shift+K global hotkey opens th	local-only	active	0	MIT (inherited	M
Text-to-speech-Visaul-Novel	win	OCR-region	no	an always-on-top draggable overlay	hybrid	active	2	none declared	M
Text2Speech (IlyaLts)	win/X11	copy-sel	no	a user-configured global hotkey pe	cloud-API	active	0	GPL-3.0	M
TextAloud (NextUp)	win	clip-watch	no	user-configured global hotkeys (Se	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
TextAloud 4 (NextUp.com)	win	clip-watch	?	Floating Toolbar that acts on the	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary co	V
TextExtractorWin	win	OCR-region	yes	global hotkeys that work from any	local-only	active	0	not declared (	M
TextToSpeech (appinn-featured Windows tool)	win	?	?	Alt+S, with multi-press semantics:	unknown	unknown		unknown	V
Thunder screen reader (Screenreader.net / WebbIE)	win	follow-focus	?	a set of keyboard shortcuts docume	local-only	dormant		freeware, clos	M
TinyReadAloud	win	copy-sel	yes	Global hotkeys, all configurable w	hybrid	active	2	None declared	M
TinySpeech (DannyBen)	win	copy-sel	yes	F1 speak selected text, F3 pause/r	local-only	dormant	5	MIT	M
Translumo	win	OCR-region	—	Alt+Q defines the capture area on	hybrid	active	5600	Apache-2.0	M
Translumo Enchanced (MixeroTN fork)	win	OCR-region	no	user marks a screen area, then a h	local-only	dormant	5	Apache-2.0	L
tts-hotkey (jborza)	win/mac/lin	copy-sel	yes	global shortcut, default Ctrl+[ ,	local-only	dormant	0	not declared (	M
TTS-Hotkey (KarolStoinski)	win	copy-sel	yes	A single global hotkey registered	os-native	dormant	0	MIT	M
tts-reader-local	win/mac/lin	copy-sel	yes	global hotkeys, all configurable i	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
TTS_selected_text_globally_in_Windows (DarwishCS)	win	copy-sel	?	hotkey binding that copies the sel	local-only	active	2	MIT	M
UGTLive	win	OCR-region	—	drag the main window rectangle ove	hybrid	active	104	NOASSERTION (G	M
Virtual Vision (MicroPower)	win	follow-focus	no	unknown — no source I could open n	local-only	unknown		proprietary, c	L
Vocal-Eyes (GW Micro) and the DOS-era screen-reader cluster	win	OCR-full	no	?	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
VoiceBoard (YohanCS)	win/mac/lin	clip-watch	no	passive clipboard monitor	unknown	active	0	none declared	L
VoivoClip / CoeiroClip / AivoClip (led-mirage)	win	clip-watch	no	the user's own copy while clipboar	local-only	active	8	MIT	M
Vovsoft Clipboard Reader	win	clip-watch	no	Ctrl+Alt+C global hotkey by defaul	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary fr	V
Windows Narrator	win	follow-focus	no	Win+Ctrl+Enter starts and stops Na	os-native	active		Proprietary; b	M
Windows Narrator - read the current selection on a keystroke	win	follow-focus	no	Keyboard commands from Microsoft's	os-native	active		Microsoft prop	M
Windows Narrator Ctrl+Alt+Spacebar (read items selected in the c	win	follow-focus	no	?	os-native	active		Microsoft prop	M
Windows Speech Recognition Macros "read that" voice command	win	copy-sel	yes	the spoken phrase 'read that' reco	os-native	dormant		Microsoft prop	M
Windows System Tray Text-to-Speech (mukibulh)	win	copy-sel	?	Ctrl+Shift+Q global hotkey; the to	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
windows-speak-selection (onebytegone)	win	copy-sel	yes	Ctrl+Esc, registered by copy-selec	os-native	dormant	0	MIT	M
WinPopclip (millionart)	win	copy-sel	yes	the action bar pops up at the curs	local-only	dormant	118	none declared	M
WordQ (and WordQ & SpeakQ), Quillsoft	win/mac/ext	copy-sel	yes	F6 on the current selection, then	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; in	M
Zabaware Text-to-Speech Reader	win	clip-watch	no	The program runs resident (a Start	os-native	commercial-l		Proprietary; f	M
ZDSR (Zhengdu Screen Reader)	win	follow-focus	no	screen-reader hotkey groups (the v	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary; f	V
ZoomText / Fusion (Vispero)	win	follow-focus	?	not re-verifiable this pass	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	L
ZoomText Fusion	win	follow-focus	no	AppReader and DocReader commands p	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
zotero-edge-tts (ccwss-maker)	win/mac/lin	doc	no	select text inside Zotero's reader	cloud-API	active	0	none declared	V
إبصار / Ibsar (شركة صخر للبرمجيات / Sakhr Software)	win	?	?	keyboard commands — the page state	local-only	unknown		proprietary	V
هال العربي / Arabic Hal (الناطق للتكنولوجيا / Nattiq Technologie	win	follow-focus	?	unknown - no reachable documentati	local-only	unknown		proprietary	L
晨光读屏 (Chenguang Screen Reader) · 布莱叶读屏 (Braille Screen Reader) ·	win/and	?	?	unknown	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
棒読みちゃん (Bouyomi-chan)	win	clip-watch	no	resident application monitoring th	local-only	dormant		freeware (dona	M
永德读屏 (Yongde Screen Reader)	win	?	?	unknown — the source read document	local-only	discontinued		proprietary	L
드림보이스 (DreamVoice) — 실로암시각장애인복지관 소프트웨어개발원	win	?	?	unknown — no product documentation	local-only	dormant		unknown; the i	L
센스리더 (Sense Reader) — (주)엑스비전테크놀로지 / XVision Technology	win	follow-focus	?	unknown - the vendor's product pag	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary	V
AdaptAble (kanjustin)	ext	DOM	no	natural-language request in the ex	hybrid	active	1	none declared	V
apollo-reader (DigitalCyberSoft)	ext	DOM	no	cursor position or the selection	unknown	active	1	none declared	V
Assorted Chrome/Edge read-aloud extensions (selection-scoped)	ext	DOM	no	right-click context-menu item on t	hybrid	active	0	Apache-2.0 (re	M
audio-reader (HasanResul)	ext	DOM	no	extension action over the selectio	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
bluevisor/Kokoro-tts (Chrome extension)	ext	DOM	no	Floating 'Read' button that appear	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
CastReader	ext	DOM	no	right-click context menu 'Read Sel	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary	V
CastReader	ext/ios/and	DOM	no	Right-click context menu 'Read Sel	cloud-API	commercial-l	1	Proprietary; f	V
Chinese 划词朗读 browser/desktop cluster: NOime22/Web-listen · NiroD	ext/win	DOM	no	floating button on the selection o	hybrid	active	0	MIT: Web-liste	M
chocoa/Yukkureader	ext	DOM	no	right-click context-menu item on t	local-only	dormant	0	none declared	M
Chrome TTS Reader (liuzan678/chrome-tts-reader)	ext	DOM	no	right-click context menu on a sele	unknown	active	2	Apache-2.0	M
chrome-tts-extension (KP3530)	ext	DOM	no	selection detection (debounced) pl	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
chrome_readaloud_extension (otischan-dev)	ext	DOM	no	extension action over page content	unknown	active	0	none declared	L
ChromeVox	ext	follow-focus	no	Ctrl+Alt+z toggles ChromeVox on or	os-native	active		BSD-3-Clause (	M
ClearPath (clearpath-ext)	ext	DOM	no	extension toolbar over the current	unknown	active	1	MIT	V
cloud-speech (Vivswan/cloud-speech)	ext	DOM	no	Context menu, keyboard shortcut Ct	cloud-API	active	2	MIT	M
dream_speaker / 梦想小说朗读助手 (ryapp)	ext	DOM	no	click the extension icon beside th	local-only	dormant	42	none declared	M
Edge TTS Reader browser extension (travisvn/edge-tts-extension)	ext	DOM	no	right-click context menu (selectio	cloud-API	active	75	AGPL-3.0	M
Firefox AMO read-aloud cluster (Read Aloud, 'Read Aloud: Text to	ext	DOM	no	toolbar button; the same product's	hybrid	active	215,353	GPL-3.0-only	M
fox-howl (littleoffice)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	0	GPL-3.0	V
FreeVoice Reader (Chrome extension + freevoicereader.com)	ext	DOM	no	Cmd+Shift+K (Mac) / Ctrl+Shift+K (	local-only	active	2	MIT (CORDOC-LL	M
gentle-reader	ext	DOM	no	right-click context-menu item 'Gen	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	M
hearvox (Adamovix, formerly read-aloud-tts)	ext	DOM	no	right-click context menu entry 'He	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	M
Helperbird (OCR / Screenshot Reader)	ext	OCR-region	?	extension toolbar / feature menu;	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary, f	V
HoverSpeak	ext	DOM	no	hover over text, or select and pre	hybrid	commercial-l	2,000	proprietary, f	V
inworld-selection-tts-extension (YichengDWu)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	V
koko-ext (lucataco)	ext	DOM	no	highlight text in the page	unknown	active	1	none declared	L
kokoro-read-aloud-chrome	ext/win/mac/lin	DOM	no	right-click context-menu item 'Rea	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
kokoro-reader (rickyraymond)	ext	DOM	no	extension action over the page or	local-only	dormant	0	none declared	V
kokoro-tts-extension (alhelal-0)	ext	DOM	no	Headphones button that pops up nex	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
Linguist (translate-tools)	ext/and	DOM	no	highlight text in the page, then u	hybrid	active	1045	BSD-3-Clause	M
LocalReadTranslate (Yan-ShiBo)	ext	DOM	no	select text in the page; the exten	local-only	active	1	MIT	V
Milan_AI (mkchand02)	ext	DOM	no	voice command; the agent then narr	hybrid	active	0	MIT	L
MouseTooltipTranslator	ext	DOM	no	hover the pointer over text; hold	hybrid	active	1286	MIT	M
MouseTooltipTranslator (neoOpus fork)	ext	DOM	no	mouse hover over text in the page,	hybrid	active	3	MIT	D
MS Edge TTS Extension (yacine-bens)	ext	?	no	extension UI (selection scope not	cloud-API	active	83	none declared	L
My Little Chrome Reader (vanja-ivancevic/My-Little-Chrome-Reader	ext	DOM	no	right-click context menu — 'Read t	cloud-API	dormant	1	MIT	M
Namida OCR (Leapward-Koex/Namida-OCR)	ext	OCR-region	yes	Alt+Q on Windows, Option+Q on Mac,	local-only	active	15	GPL-3.0	M
NaturalReader browser extension	ext	DOM	no	extension toolbar play button on t	cloud-API	commercial-l	500,000	proprietary, f	V
Oribi Speak	ext	DOM	no	Select text, then click the green	hybrid	unknown		Commercial (Or	V
perch-reader	ext/web	DOM	no	click the Perch icon in the Chrome	local-only	active	2	Unlicense	M
Pericles (calinalexandru/pericles)	ext	DOM	no	extension popup — the README's own	unknown	dormant	14	MIT	M
piper-tts extension (n8watkins)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
PNL Reader (pnlpal/pnl-reader)	ext	DOM	no	Click the extension icon on a page	local-only	active	15	GPL-3.0	M
pocket-reader	ext	DOM	no	extension toolbar icon opens a pop	local-only	active	98	none declared	M
qwen-read-aloud	ext	DOM	no	Floating read button next to the p	cloud-API	active	5	none declared	M
Read Aloud (ken107/read-aloud)	ext	DOM	no	Extension toolbar button, right-cl	hybrid	active	1723	MIT	M
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader (Chrome/Firefox extens	ext	DOM	no	toolbar icon; right-click context	hybrid	active	1723	MIT (source re	M
read-aloud (beanwl)	ext/win/X11	DOM	no	right-click a selection in Chrome/	hybrid	active	0	none declared	M
read-aloud-tts-with-kokoro (gabor-minya)	ext	DOM	no	extension action; click a sentence	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
Read-Selected-English (WayneCYChang)	ext	DOM	no	an inline speaker icon appears nex	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
ReadAloud (mystilleef)	ext	DOM	no	toolbar icon to start/stop; triple	unknown	active	2	GPL-3.0	M
readaloud-pro (einadid)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	unknown	active	1	none declared	V
Reader (oliver-moran/reader)	ext	DOM	no	Ctrl+Shift+Space (manifest.json co	unknown	dormant	0	MIT	M
ReadVox	ext	DOM	no	unread	cloud-API	unknown		proprietary fr	V
Recito (allgemeiner-intellekt)	ext	DOM	no	extension popup/toolbar (selection	unknown	active	1	MIT	L
Riddi (pmbstyle/Riddi)	ext	DOM	—	floating widget in the page corner	local-only	active	9	MIT	M
Select and Speak (iSpeech) Chrome extension	ext	DOM	no	Right-click context menu entries '	local-only	active		Proprietary /	V
select-and-speak (annmariatech)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	0	none declared	L
Select_To_Speak (devansh-jagtap)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
Selection Assistant (vikaschauhan123)	ext	DOM	no	A floating toolbar injected by a c	hybrid	active	0	none declared	M
SelectionSpeaker (DVLP)	ext	DOM	no	clicking the 'READ SELECTED' bookm	local-only	dormant	16	MIT	M
simple-read-aloud-extension (tobiasGuta)	ext	DOM	no	extension action over page content	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
Snap&Read Universal	ext	OCR-region	?	toolbar controls inside the Chrome	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary, s	V
speak (wis/speak)	ext	DOM	no	Speak-on-select and speak-on-click	local-only	dormant	16	none declared	M
Speakit-Chrome-extension (enoshjoseph)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	1	none declared	V
Speakoala	ext	DOM	no	A floating in-page button that app	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary (f	M
Speechify browser extension	ext/ios/and/mac	DOM	?	Sidebar player on any website, in-	cloud-API	commercial-l		Proprietary, f	V
Spiel (preet01)	ext/mac	DOM	no	toolbar Play button; click any par	local-only	active	3	MIT	M
Talkie (joelpurra/talkie)	ext	DOM	no	Talkie toolbar button, or right-cl	local-only	active	78	GPL-3.0 (Talki	M
Text Reader: Free TTS Selected Text Reader (Chrome extension)	ext	DOM	no	Click the extension's toolbar butt	local-only	active		Proprietary (C	M
text-reader-extension (sokol-matija)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	hybrid	active	0	none declared	V
Translator-UNI (vanppsa)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page, with a floa	hybrid	active	0	MIT	V
tts-reader-extension (jSayal)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	cloud-API	active	1	MIT	V
unsilent-reader (themez)	ext	DOM	no	extension action over page content	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	L
vocalize-google-extension (fleizean)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	unknown	dormant	0	MIT	L
Voice Instead (Chrome extension)	ext	?	?	Never documented in any source I c	unknown	discontinued		proprietary (a	L
voice-reader (romkakn)	ext	DOM	no	right-click on the selection	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
VoiceOne (RohitWaghire/VoiceOne)	ext	DOM	—	right-click context menu on a sele	local-only	active	2	MIT	M
voxlight (alessandroarioli)	ext	DOM	no	selection in the page	local-only	active	0	none declared	V
XTTS-Read-Aloud (psdwizzard/XTTS-Read-Aloud)	ext	DOM	no	extension popup — choose a voice,	hybrid	active	48	MIT	M
Apple VoiceOver Recognition (Text Recognition)	ios/mac	OCR-full	no	VoiceOver gestures / rotor (VoiceO	os-native	unknown		proprietary, b	L
iOS/iPadOS Speak Selection + Accessibility Reader	ios	AX-sel	no	select text then tap Speak (Speak	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary (b	M
iOS/iPadOS Speak Selection and Speak Screen	ios	AX-sel	no	Speak Selection: select text, then	os-native	active		proprietary, b	M
Aloud (BuckyMcYolo)	mac	AX-sel	?	Opt-Shift-S global hotkey over the	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
aloud-tts	mac	copy-sel	yes	Control+Option+S global hotkey (co	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
Apple VoiceOver	mac/ios	follow-focus	?	?	os-native	?		Proprietary, b	L
Apple VoiceOver	mac/ios	follow-focus	no	Command-F5 toggles VoiceOver; Comm	os-native	active		Proprietary; b	M
better-macos-speak-selection	mac	AX-sel	no	Option+Escape (Carbon RegisterEven	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
Bob (ripperhe)	mac	?	?	selection hotkey / screenshot hotk	hybrid	active	9718	none declared	M
BoxTalk	mac/win/lin/ext	DOM	no	right-click a selection -> 'Speak	local-only	active	0	not declared (	M
btt-read-selection	mac	?	?	whatever BetterTouchTool trigger t	os-native	dormant	1	none declared	M
chatter	mac	clip-watch	no	modifier chord, default both Comma	cloud-API	dormant	0	none declared	M
chatterbox-readaloud (dhl84)	mac	clip-watch	?	menu-bar hotkeys over the clipboar	local-only	active	0	MIT	V
clearspeaker (OctavianTocan)	mac	AX-sel	?	Raycast command over the current s	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	V
ClipboardTTS (liboyin)	mac	clip-watch	no	menu-bar dropdown; plus a macOS Se	cloud-API	active	0	AGPL-3.0	M
clipread / ClipRead (rhizome88)	mac	clip-watch	no	hotkey after the user copies (the	cloud-API	active	0	none declared	V
Dictater	mac	AX-sel	no	right-click > Services > Dictate (	os-native	dormant	227	MIT	M
Easydict (tisfeng)	mac	AX-sel	yes	Option+D selection translate, Opti	hybrid	active	14160	GPL-3.0	M
EchoPad (don-miguel)	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+Command+S speaks the select	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
Fish Screen Reader	mac	OCR-full	no	hotkeys over the recognised list (	hybrid	commercial-l	0	proprietary; A	V
Flick (rshome1030)	mac	AX-sel	no	the bar pops up at the cursor when	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
GhostReader / GhostReader Plus (Convivo)	mac	?	?	unknown - the listing says 'Read s	local-only	dormant	9,993	proprietary; M	V
hibiki (jsap7 fork)	mac	AX-sel	no	global hotkeys Option+F (speak) an	cloud-API	active	0	not declared (	M
Keyboard Maestro (talking-maestro macro)	mac	copy-sel	yes	Keyboard Maestro HotKey trigger, s	os-native	dormant	2	Unlicense (the	M
LivingTTS	mac	AX-sel	no	default global hotkey Control+Opti	local-only	dormant	2	MIT	M
macOS Automator Quick Action / Services 'Speak text' route (nati	mac	AX-sel	no	user-assigned keyboard shortcut un	os-native	active		OS feature	D
macOS legacy 'Speak selected text when the key is pressed' + the	mac	copy-sel	yes	A user-set key combination under S	os-native	discontinued		OS feature	L
macOS Services item 'Speech > Start Speaking Text' (com.apple.sp	mac	AX-sel	no	Services menu item 'Speech > Start	os-native	active		proprietary, b	M
macOS Shortcuts.app 'Get Clipboard -> Speak' recipe	mac	clip-watch	no	A Shortcut run from the Shortcuts	os-native	active		n/a (a recipe,	M
macOS Spoken Content / Speak Selection	mac	AX-sel	no	Option-Esc by default, user-config	os-native	active		proprietary, b	M
macOS Spoken Content / Speak Selection (Accessibility)	mac	AX-sel	no	Option-Esc by default, re-recordab	os-native	active		proprietary (p	M
macOS-OpenAI-Text-to-Speech (Saiko-Seiko)	mac	?	?	keyboard shortcut over the current	cloud-API	active	8	none declared	V
manga-voice-reader	mac/ext	OCR-region	no	Play button in a floating in-page	local-only	active	1	NOASSERTION (G	M
MLXRead	mac	AX-sel	no	Option+Escape event tap (press aga	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
MoePeek (cosZone)	mac	AX-sel	yes	Option+D translate selection, Opti	hybrid	active	710	AGPL-3.0	M
Murmur (latent-variable)	mac	AX-sel	no	global hotkey Cmd-Shift-R, plus 'S	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Myna	mac	copy-sel	yes	global hotkeys ⌘⌥⇧S / ⌘⌥⇧A (rebind	local-only	active	2	MIT	M
Narrateify (yasarkaancan)	mac	AX-sel	?	Ctrl-Opt-R narrate selection; Ctrl	hybrid	active	0	MIT	M
Omi 朗读小助手 (omi-read-aloud)	mac	clip-watch	no	global hotkey ⌥⇧Q after the user's	cloud-API	active	58	MIT	M
Orate	mac/ios	?	?	Option+Cmd+L global hotkey; right-	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, $	V
Orator (orator-macos)	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+' (also Option+Return) glob	local-only	active	2	MIT	M
outSPOKEN (Berkeley Systems, later ALVA Access Group)	mac/win	follow-focus	?	Not documented in any source I cou	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
personal-helper / Osobny pomocnik (matuskarak)	mac	?	?	menu-bar app (unread)	unknown	active	0	none declared	L
popclip-azure-text-to-speech	mac	AX-sel	no	PopClip's floating popup bar, whic	cloud-API	dormant	24	AGPL-3.0	M
quoth	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+Shift+/ global hotkey to sp	hybrid	active	0	Unlicense	M
Raycast extension: AI Voice Studio	mac	AX-sel	?	Raycast launcher commands ('Quick	cloud-API	active	20	MIT	M
Raycast extension: Azure Speech TTS (liualexiang)	mac/win	AX-sel	?	One Raycast command, 'Azure Speech	cloud-API	active		see the raycas	M
Raycast extension: Doubao TTS	mac	AX-sel	yes	the Raycast command 'Quick Read Se	cloud-API	active	46	MIT	M
Raycast extension: ElevenLabs TTS	mac	?	?	a Raycast command invoked from the	cloud-API	active	2,129	MIT (extension	M
Raycast extension: Gemini TTS	mac	?	?	run the 'Quick Read Selected Text'	cloud-API	active	52	see store list	M
Raycast extension: MiMo TTS	mac	AX-sel	no	Raycast commands run from the Rayc	cloud-API	active	6	MIT	M
Raycast extension: MiniMax TTS	mac	AX-sel	?	the Raycast command 'Quick Read Se	cloud-API	active	18	unknown (the s	M
Raycast extension: OpenAI Speak	mac	?	?	the Raycast launcher command 'Spea	cloud-API	active	1,275	MIT (extension	M
Raycast extension: Read AI	mac	AX-sel	?	run the 'Read Selected Text | Bac	cloud-API	active	2,717	MIT	M
Raycast extension: Say	mac/win	?	?	the Raycast launcher hotkey then t	os-native	active	2,584	MIT	M
raycast-doubao-tts (semantic-craft)	mac	AX-sel	?	Raycast command invoked over the c	cloud-API	active	3	MIT	V
Raycast-Minimax-TTS (semantic-craft)	mac	AX-sel	?	Raycast command invoked over the c	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	V
raycast-tts-reader	mac	AX-sel	?	the Raycast command 'Read Selected	hybrid	active	0	not declared (	M
read-aloud-macos	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+Cmd+R read selection, Optio	local-only	dormant	0	MIT	M
read-this-macos (bacharyehya)	mac	clip-watch	no	a single global keyboard shortcut	hybrid	active	0	MIT	V
ReadAloud (readaloud-sigma)	mac	?	?	one user-set global shortcut: 'Set	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary; 3	V
ReadMe (valllabh/readme-tts)	mac	AX-sel	?	Cmd-Opt-R global shortcut or the m	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
SayIt	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+S global hotkey	os-native	dormant	0	MIT per the RE	M
SimpleTTS / kokoro-hotkey (FatherMarz)	mac	copy-sel	yes	Cmd+I speak selection, Cmd+Shift+I	local-only	dormant	0	MIT	M
Skidudeaa/speak11 (detached 2026 derivative of smcantab/speak11)	mac	copy-sel	no	global hotkey Option-Shift-/ regis	hybrid	active	0	Unlicense	M
Sotto	mac	?	?	?	local-only	?		unknown	L
Sotto	mac	AX-sel	no	configurable global shortcut, Cmd+	local-only	active	4	Apache-2.0	M
speak-selection-mac (HyperfocuSam)	mac	copy-sel	no	Raycast script commands with user-	cloud-API	active	0	MIT	M
Speak11	mac	?	?	?	cloud-API	?		unknown	L
speak11	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+Shift+/ registered as a glo	hybrid	active	17	Unlicense	M
SpeakCopy	mac	copy-sel	yes	Hardcoded hotkey F + Option + Cont	os-native	dormant	2	none declared	M
SpeakEasyTTS (JrPribs)	mac	?	?	always-on-top widget invoked over	hybrid	active	0	none declared	L
SpeakHUD (chris-jk)	mac	clip-watch	no	Ctrl-Opt-S global hotkey (user-con	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
SpeakIt (Atemndobs)	mac	copy-sel	yes	global hotkey, default Control+Com	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
SpeakPro (jaysidd)	mac	clip-watch	no	Cmd-Ctrl-S bound as a macOS Shortc	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
SpeakRate	mac	copy-sel	yes	Option+Command+R read selection /	os-native	active	2	MIT	M
speed-read (sr) — OneRedOak	mac	AX-sel	no	global hotkey, default Option+Shif	hybrid	active	6	MIT	M
Subvocal	mac	AX-sel	no	Global hotkey Cmd+Shift+R by defau	local-only	dormant	0	MIT	M
Supertonic Read Selection (TypeWhisper plugin)	mac	AX-sel	yes	a shortcut the user records in the	local-only	active	1	GPL-3.0	M
SuperUtter	mac	clip-watch	no	Ctrl+Option+U read clipboard, Ctrl	hybrid	active	0	proprietary —	M
TDSR	mac/lin/hl	follow-focus	no	Alt-key review commands inside the	local-only	active	102	GPL-3.0	M
text-listener-app (motaterry)	mac	AX-sel	no	global capture over the current se	local-only	active	1	none declared	M
TextGO (C5H12O5)	mac/win	AX-sel	no	README: 'Multiple Triggers: Config	hybrid	active	327	GPL-3.0	M
tianye20280815/mac-multilang-tts	mac	copy-sel	yes	global hotkeys ⌃⌥⌘D / ⌃⌥⌘E / ⌃⌥⌘F,	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
TrayTalk	mac	AX-sel	yes	a global hotkey the user records i	cloud-API	active	2	none declared	M
Voice Reader (liuno6)	mac	follow-focus	?	floating speaker button next to th	local-only	active	0	none declared	M
voice-out (hileix)	mac/win/lin	copy-sel	yes	Option+V on macOS, Alt+V on Window	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Voices (goodsnooze)	mac	?	?	unread	unknown	unknown		proprietary (G	L
Vosh	mac	follow-focus	?	?	unknown	?		unknown	L
Vosh	mac	follow-focus	no	CapsLock is the 'Vosh key' (CapsLo	local-only	dormant	32	BSD-2-Clause	M
wangz-code/read-screen	mac/win/lin	OCR-region	—	run python main.py, drag a regio	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
whisper-shortcut (mgsgde)	mac	copy-sel	yes	Cmd+4 Read Aloud by default; every	cloud-API	active	68	AGPL-3.0	M
WithAudio	mac/win	?	?	vendor calls it 'Global Capture' o	local-only	active		proprietary, o	V
WordWand	mac	?	?	a keyboard shortcut in any applica	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary; f	V
Xpop (DongqiShen)	mac	AX-sel	no	the popup menu appears automatical	local-only	dormant	8	GPL-3.0	M
Yap (latent-variable)	mac	AX-sel	?	global hotkey (inherited Murmur mo	local-only	active	3	MIT	V
Yapper (repository formerly kokoro-speak, ACNoonan)	mac	AX-sel	yes	A global hotkey (README documents	local-only	active	0	MIT	M
Yapper / kokoro-speak	mac	AX-sel	?	?	local-only	?		check repo	M
Yaps	mac/win/lin/and/ext	?	?	Option+Fn on desktop, per the vend	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
ydna564/Screen-Reader	mac	OCR-region	no	global hotkey ⇧⌘1 caught by pynput	local-only	active	1	MIT	M
Desktop Reader (hlindquist/bookreaderpackages)	legacy	OCR-region	?	?	unknown	?	0	none declared	L
Nuance TALKS / TALKS&ZOOMS and Code Factory Mobile Speak	legacy/win	follow-focus	?	Handset key commands on Symbian S6	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L
ReadSpeaker TextAid	web/ext/ios/and	DOM	no	Browser-extension toolbar, includi	cloud-API	commercial-l		Commercial sub	V
IBM Screen Reader (DOS, 1986) and IBM Screen Reader/2 (OS/2)	?	OCR-full	no	a dedicated separate 18-key keypad	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	M
jmdaweb/habla	?	OCR-full	—	resident program activated with `h	local-only	dormant	0	GPL-2.0	D
Vocal-Eyes (GW Micro) and the DOS-era screen-reader cluster	?	OCR-full	—	Resident TSR key commands on the D	local-only	discontinued		proprietary co	L

catalogue-engines.md

Catalogue — Synthesis engines — hand them a string, get audio

279 entries. Evidence tier: M measured (source read) · V vendor claim · L lead, unverified · D derived.

Acq = acquisition mechanism. Clipboard = does reading a selection clobber your clipboard. Superlatives appearing in these cells sit inside attributed quotations; the catalogue does not rank.

Tool	Plat	What it is	Runtime	Status	Stars	Licence	Ev
Android TextToSpeech (android.speech.tts)	and	Android's pluggable TTS façade: enumerate installed engines and voices, queue or flush utterances, synthesize straight to a file, and swap the backing	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
android-yandex-tts (axet)	and	'Android TTS engine using Yandex voice REST API' — installs as a system TTS engine on Android.	cloud-API	unknown	1	unknown	L
AndroidMaryTTS	and	Offline HMM MaryTTS port for Android.	local-only	?	201	none declared	M
ChineseTtsTflite (F-Droid)	and	"Chinese TTS Engine Based On Tensorflow TTS" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
CloneTTS	and	Offline Android TTS engine that registers system-wide as the device's TTS provider.	local-only	?	764	none declared	L
Muse - Text to Speech (F-Droid)	and	"Convert text to natural-speaking audio with custom voices and pauses" [vendor].	local-only	active	52	GPL-3.0	V
NekoSpeak	and	Private offline AI text-to-speech for Android supporting Kokoro, KittenTTS, Pocket-tts and Piper models.	local-only	?	132	see repo	L
SherpaTTS	and	Android system TTS engine built on Next-gen Kaldi (sherpa-onnx) that exposes Piper and Coqui voices to any Android app through the platform TTS API.	local-only	?		open source (r	L
SherpaTTS (F-Droid)	and	"Text-to-Speech engine based on Next-gen Kaldi" [vendor] — installs as an Android system TTS engine.	local-only	active	749	GPL-3.0	V
Supertonic TTS (F-Droid)	and	"Local AI Text-to-Speech using Supertonic ONNX" [vendor].	local-only	active		unknown	V
SVOX (Classic TTS, Pico)	and/legacy	Swiss embedded TTS house whose Pico voices shipped preinstalled on a generation of Android phones and whose Classic TTS engine was a common third-part	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, p	M
VoxSherpa-TTS	and	Offline neural TTS engine for Android built on sherpa-onnx.	local-only	?	192	see repo	L
Amphion	lin	Toolkit for audio, music and speech generation (includes MaskGCT and other TTS systems).	local-only	?	10	MIT	M
aspeak	lin	"A simple text-to-speech client for Azure TTS API." [vendor, AUR description]	cloud-API	dormant		unknown	V
baratinoo2pcm (Hypra)	lin	'Command-line interface for the Baratinoo/Voxygen TTS system' — the bridge that lets Linux screen readers use the commercial French Voxygen voices.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
Bark	lin/win	Text-prompted generative audio model (speech, music, sfx, nonverbals).	local-only	?	39	MIT	M
Brasil TTS	lin	Brazilian-Portuguese speech synthesizer set that reads screens for visually impaired users, explicitly also aimed at people with dyslexia and other re	local-only	?	69	see repo	L
Chatterbox	lin/win/mac	Resemble AI's open TTS family, including Turbo (350M) and Nano (110M) variants with paralinguistic tags.	local-only	?	25	MIT	M
ChatTTS	lin/win	Generative speech model tuned for conversational dialogue.	local-only	?	39	AGPL-3.0	M
Code Factory — Cerence TTS SDK	lin/and/win/ios/legacy	Code Factory's remaining Cerence business is an integrator SDK, not a consumer voice pack — Linux, Android, Windows, iOS, plus a WebAssembly build for	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary OE	M
Coqui TTS (coqui-ai/TTS)	lin/win/legacy	Deep-learning toolkit for text-to-speech with a large model zoo, commonly used as a research and production synthesis engine.	local-only	?	40	MPL-2.0	L
CosyVoice	lin	Multilingual large voice generation model with inference, training and deployment.	local-only	?	22	Apache-2.0	M
DECtalk — modern builds (dectalk/dectalk)	lin/win/mac/ios/legacy	The 1983 Klatt-formant synthesizer, rebuilt from source dumped by its original developer, now compiling for Linux/Windows/macOS/iOS on i386, x86_64 an	local-only	active		Unresolved. Th	M
Dia	lin/mac	1.6B dialogue TTS generating multi-speaker conversation in one pass.	local-only	?	19	Apache-2.0	M
docker-qwenspeak / docker-talkies / aigate / docker-audiolla (ps	lin	Self-hosted container line: Qwen3-TTS over SSH with YAML-piped voice config (docker-qwenspeak), an OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/speech + /v1/audio/tran	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V
eflite	lin	Festival-Lite-based speech server used by Speakup and Emacspeak on Linux; Debian keeps it alive at 0.4.1-14 on Salsa.	local-only	dormant		unknown	V
Ekho	lin	Multilingual synthesizer for Cantonese, Mandarin, Toisanese, Zhaoan Hakka, Tibetan, Ngangien, Korean and English.	local-only	active		unknown	V
EmotiVoice	lin/win	Multi-voice, prompt-controlled emotional TTS (2000+ voices).	local-only	?	8	Apache-2.0	M
Epos	lin	Language-independent rule-driven speech synthesis system from the Czech Academy of Sciences.	local-only	dormant		unknown	V
Epos TTS System	lin/win	'Epos is a language independent rule-driven Text-to-Speech (TTS) system primarily designed to serve as a research tool', independent of the language p	local-only	dormant		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
eSpeak NG	lin/win/mac/and/legacy	Compact formant-synthesis engine for 100+ languages, the default fallback voice behind much of the Linux and screen-reader stack; the original eSpeak	local-only	discontinued	5	GPL-3.0	M
espeakbox	lin/legacy	eSpeak wrapped as an HTTP service in a 17.2MB Docker image.	local-only	?	137	MIT	M
F5-TTS	lin/win/mac	Flow-matching zero-shot TTS ('A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech').	local-only	?	15	MIT (code); ch	M
Festival	lin/mac	The classic full Festival Speech Synthesis System.	local-only	?	458	NOASSERTION (B	M
Fish-Speech / OpenAudio	lin/win	Multilingual TTS with a slow-AR 4B + fast-AR 400M split architecture.	local-only	?	32	NOASSERTION (c	M
Flite	lin/mac/win/legacy	Small, fast, portable run-time synthesis engine from CMU (Festival Lite).	local-only	?	1	NOASSERTION (B	M
FreeTTS	lin/mac/win	'FreeTTS is a speech synthesis engine written entirely in the Java programming language... written by the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Team an	local-only	dormant		BSD (SF catego	V
Gespeaker (muflone)	lin	GTK+ front end for eSpeak and MBROLA that plays text in many languages with per-language voice settings; long-standing Linux desktop TTS utility.	local-only	?	76	GPL	M
Glate (Flathub)	lin	Linux desktop app that translates text and generates speech audio from it.	hybrid	?		unknown	L
GNUspeech (Articulatory Speech Synthesis)	lin/mac	GNU project hosted on Savannah, registered under the group title 'Articulatory Speech Synthesis' — a tube-model articulatory synthesiser rather than a	local-only	dormant		GPL (GNU proje	V
GNUstep say (gnustep-gui-runtime)	lin	The +183 accepted Ask Ubuntu answer lists say from gnustep-gui-runtime first; a later benchmark answer in the same thread rates it 'n' for sounding	local-only	active		LGPL (GNUstep)	M
Higgs Audio	lin	Text-audio foundation model from Boson AI.	local-only	?	8	Apache-2.0	M
IMS-Toucan	lin	Controllable, fast TTS covering over 7000 languages.	local-only	?	2	Apache-2.0	M
IndexTTS	lin/win	Industrial zero-shot controllable TTS from Bilibili.	local-only	?	22	NOASSERTION (c	M
KaniTTS	lin	Small fast TTS (~370M class per a Vietnamese fine-tune) with a PyPI package for v2.	local-only	?	459	NOASSERTION	L
kokoro-server (kira)	lin	'HTTP server interface to the speech synthesis program, kokoro.'	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Kyutai delayed-streams-modeling	lin/mac	Kyutai's streaming STT and TTS models (the TTS side of the Moshi line).	local-only	?	3	Apache-2.0	M
Larynx	lin	Rhasspy's pre-Piper end-to-end TTS using gruut + ONNX.	local-only	?	829	MIT	M
LightTTS	lin	Lightweight inference framework optimized for CosyVoice2/CosyVoice.	local-only	?	48	Apache-2.0	L
LLaSA	lin	LLaMA-based speech synthesis; train-time and inference-time compute scaling.	local-only	?	662	NOASSERTION	M
LuxTTS	lin/win	Voice-cloning TTS advertising ~150x realtime and 48kHz output.	local-only	?	4	Apache-2.0	L
MARS5-TTS	lin	CAMB.AI's MARS5 speech model.	local-only	?	2	AGPL-3.0	M
MaryTTS	lin/win/mac	Multilingual Java TTS platform with a client/server architecture.	local-only	?	2	NOASSERTION (L	M
Matcha-TTS	lin/mac	Fast non-autoregressive TTS using conditional flow matching (ICASSP 2024).	local-only	?	1	MIT	M
MBROLA	lin/win	Classic diphone speech synthesizer and its multilingual voice database, still used as a back-end for espeak-ng.	local-only	?	500	AGPL-3.0 (reli	L
MetaVoice-1B	lin	1.2B foundational expressive TTS model.	local-only	?	4	Apache-2.0	M
Mimic 3 (Mycroft)	lin/legacy	Mycroft's fast local neural TTS engine, designed to run on low-end hardware including Raspberry Pi.	local-only	?	1	AGPL-3.0	L
MisoTTS	lin	8-billion-parameter highly emotive TTS model.	local-only	?	3193	NOASSERTION	M
MOSS-TTS	lin	MOSS-TTS family including a realtime multi-turn context-aware variant; publishes TTFB and RTF.	local-only	?	4	Apache-2.0	M
MOSS-TTS-Nano	lin/win/mac	0.1B-parameter multilingual streaming speech model that runs on CPU without a GPU.	local-only	?	4070	Apache-2.0	M
Mozilla TTS	lin	Mozilla's deep-learning TTS - the direct predecessor of Coqui TTS.	local-only	?	10	MPL-2.0	M
nanotts	lin	'Improved SVOX PicoTTS speech synthesizer' - the streaming/CLI-ergonomics fork named in the Ask Ubuntu thread.	local-only	dormant	126	Apache-2.0	M
nanotts (ky1e fork)	lin	'Fork of nanotts, with enhancements that include speech-dispatcher configuration' — a small SVOX-pico-derived engine.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
nazdridoy/kokoro-tts (Codeberg copy)	lin/mac/win	'A CLI text-to-speech tool using the Kokoro model, supporting multiple languages, voices (with blending)'.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
NVIDIA NeMo Speech	lin	NVIDIA's scalable speech framework (ASR + TTS), formerly NVIDIA/NeMo.	local-only	?	18	Apache-2.0	M
Omilo Screen Reader	lin	GitLab repository whose only code is omilo-cli, a Qt command-line program that writes the text it is handed to /tmp and speaks it by shelling out to F	local-only	dormant	0	A LICENSE file	M
Omni Text To Speech	lin	"Its primary goal is to provide an instant, hassle-free way to transform written text into natural-sounding voice audio... Type or paste your text int	unknown	unknown		unset in store	V
OmniVoice (k2-fsa)	lin/mac/win	Voice-cloning TTS covering 600+ languages.	local-only	?	8	Apache-2.0	M
openedai-speech	lin/legacy	OpenAI-compatible TTS server over Coqui XTTS and Piper.	local-only	?	859	AGPL-3.0	M
Orpheus-TTS	lin	Llama-backboned speech model aimed at realtime agents.	local-only	?	6	Apache-2.0	M
PaddleSpeech	lin/win	Baidu's speech toolkit (ASR + TTS) on PaddlePaddle.	local-only	?	12	Apache-2.0	M
Piper (rhasspy/piper) — ARCHIVED	lin/win/mac/legacy	The original, now-archived Piper repository — still the top search result for Piper by stars.	local-only	?	11	MIT (the archi	M
Piper — CURRENT upstream (OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl)	lin/win/mac/legacy	The maintained Piper: fast local neural TTS, now developed under the Open Home Foundation and relicensed GPL-3.0.	local-only	?	5	GPL-3.0	M
piper-speak	lin	Simple text-to-speech wrapper for Piper TTS on Linux.	local-only	?	6	MIT	M
piper-tts -> pw-play streaming hotkey recipe (PipeWire)	lin	A single r/linux4noobs comment by u/Far-Cat (2023) giving a shell pipeline that streams Piper's raw output into PipeWire: `echo test | piper-tts --mo	local-only	active		n/a (forum com	M
Qwen3-TTS	lin	Alibaba Qwen's open TTS series with a dual-track hybrid streaming architecture.	local-only	?	12	Apache-2.0	M
sapo (christosangel)	lin	'A bash script that can convert txt to wav using Coqui TTS'.	local-only	unknown	3	unknown	L
say (tts-say, Waser Technologies)	lin	'echo but with TTS' — a pip-installable say command that mirrors echo's flags (-n/-e/-E/-L LANG/--out_path) and starts a local model server backed b	local-only	active	2	unknown	M
Sesame CSM	lin/win	Conversational Speech Model; 1B backbone released as open weights.	local-only	?	14	Apache-2.0	M
Soprano	lin	Instant ultra-realistic TTS; companion repo soprano-factory trains 2000x-realtime models.	local-only	?	1398	Apache-2.0	M
Spark-TTS	lin/win	LLM-based TTS with a single-stream decoupled speech token design.	local-only	?	11	Apache-2.0	M
Speak (Sugar Labs)	lin	"An animated face that speaks whatever you type" [vendor] — Sugar learning-environment activity.	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
Speech-AI-Forge	lin/win	Multi-model TTS project with API and WebUI around ChatTTS and friends.	local-only	?	1	AGPL-3.0	M
speech-dispatcher-voxin (Hypra)	lin	Speech-dispatcher output module for Voxin, the commercially licensed IBM ViaVoice/Eloquence-derived voice pack used on Linux.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
Speect	lin	'Speect is a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) system... offers a full TTS system with various APIs, as well as an environment for research and develo	local-only	dormant		MIT / X / Expa	V
Step-Audio-EditX	lin	3B LLM-based audio EDITING model (emotion/style/speed edits on existing speech).	local-only	?	961	Apache-2.0	M
StyleTTS 2	lin/win	Style-diffusion + adversarial training TTS; a common backbone for other projects.	local-only	?	6	MIT	M
SVOX Pico (libttspico / pico2wave)	lin/legacy/and	The one commercial-origin AT voice engine that ended up freely licensed: SVOX's compact engine was released in AOSP under Apache-2.0 and is packaged b	local-only	dormant	,	Apache-2.0 (AO	M
TensorFlowTTS	lin/win/and/ios	Real-time TTS in TensorFlow 2 (Tacotron2, FastSpeech, MelGAN...), with mobile export.	local-only	?	4	Apache-2.0	M
texttospeech (posktomten)	lin/win	'A library that uses texttospeech (text to speech). For Qt5 and for Qt6' — a Qt TextToSpeech wrapper library.	os-native	unknown	1	unknown	L
Tortoise-TTS	lin/win/mac	Multi-voice quality-first TTS; historically very slow, later optimized.	local-only	?	14	Apache-2.0	M
tts-api (pedroetb)	lin/legacy	Node REST API fronting multiple local TTS engines (festival, espeak, google).	hybrid	?	35	MIT	M
tts-overlay (j-junckes)	lin	A TTS overlay built for Wayland.	local-only	?	0	unknown	L
TuxTalk	lin	'TuxTalk is a software only speech synthesizer toolkit under the GPL. Its main goal is to allow the blind an open sourced and maintained [interface] a	local-only	dormant		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
TypeTalk	lin	"MaryTTS (Text2Speech) frontend with batteries included." [vendor, AUR description]	local-only	dormant		unknown	L
vall-e (lifeiteng)	lin	PyTorch VALL-E reproduction.	local-only	?	2	Apache-2.0	M
VALL-E-X	lin/win	Open implementation of Microsoft's VALL-E X zero-shot TTS.	local-only	?	7	MIT	M
VibeVoice (community fork)	lin/win	Community-maintained fork of Microsoft VibeVoice.	local-only	?	1	MIT	M
VibeVoice (Microsoft)	lin/win	Microsoft's open frontier voice model; long-form multi-speaker synthesis.	local-only	?	52	MIT	M
VITS (original)	lin	The reference VITS paper implementation; ancestor of a large share of the local-TTS field.	local-only	?	7	MIT	M
voiced (sdelcore)	lin	A combined STT and TTS daemon written for Linux/Wayland specifically.	local-only	?	0	MIT	L
VoiceGen	lin	Qt6/CMake desktop text-to-speech converter supporting multiple offline/online engines such as SVOX pico and Amazon Polly, distributed via Snap and Fla	hybrid	active	12	unknown (READM	M
VoiceGen (Flathub / GitLab)	lin	Linux Flatpak that converts text to speech; hosted on GitLab rather than GitHub.	hybrid	?		unknown	L
VoiceStudio	lin/win/mac	Open-source ElevenLabs alternative: voice clone, dub, dictate, transcribe, audiobook creator and voice workflow studio.	hybrid	?	9751	AGPL-3.0	M
vox-box	lin/mac/win	OpenAI-API-compatible TTS+STT server supporting Whisper, CosyVoice, Bark and others.	local-only	?	215	Apache-2.0	M
VoxCPM / VoxCPM2	lin/mac	Tokenizer-free multilingual TTS with voice design and cloning; 30 languages, 48kHz.	local-only	?	35	Apache-2.0	M
WhisperSpeech	lin	TTS built by inverting Whisper; fully open training pipeline.	local-only	?	4	MIT	M
wyoming-piper	lin/mac/legacy	'Wyoming protocol server for Piper text to speech system' [vendor] — wraps the Piper engine as a network daemon addressable from other machines.	local-only	active	195	MIT	M
xtts-streaming-server	lin/legacy	Reference streaming server for XTTS.	local-only	?	367	MPL-2.0	M
ZipVoice	lin	Fast zero-shot TTS with flow matching, from the k2/sherpa group.	local-only	?	1	Apache-2.0	M
Zonos	lin/win/mac	Open-weight multilingual TTS with a transformer and a hybrid (Mamba) variant.	local-only	?	7	Apache-2.0	M
Zonos2	lin	Open-weight text-to-speech mixture-of-experts model.	local-only	?	294	MIT	M
Acapela Group	win/mac/lin/legacy	Voice vendor stating on its own French site '+de 30 langues et 200 voix disponibles + voix sur mesure' built on neural synthesis; a French blind-users	hybrid	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Acapela TTS Voices for NVDA	win	Acapela's own NVDA voice pack — the counterexample to the Code Factory story, because it shipped a build for NVDA 2026.x.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary. '	M
AllTalk TTS	win/lin/legacy	TTS server built on the Coqui engine with a settings page, low-VRAM mode, DeepSpeed, a narrator mode, model finetuning and 'JSON calls' for third-part	local-only	active	2	AGPL-3.0	M
amitybell/piper	win/mac/lin	Embedded distribution of rhasspy/piper for Go — ships the engine inside a Go binary.	local-only	?	16	MIT	M
AT&T Natural Voices (AT&T Labs, licensed through Wizzard Softwar	win/lin/legacy	AT&T Labs' unit-selection voices, never sold by AT&T to end users - all sales and support were pushed to reseller Wizzard Software, which is why the v	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, p	M
Balcon (Balabolka Command Line Utility)	win	"Balabolka (Command Line Utility)... contains no graphical user interface and works only from the command line. This is useful to integrate the Text-T	local-only	active		freeware per v	V
Cepstral (Swift / SwiftTalker)	win/mac/lin	Small US voice house whose Swift engine was the premium voice option inside a generation of third-party readers (TextAloud, iSpeak It, Asterisk app_sw	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	M
Cerence Inc. — Cerence Embedded TTS / Cerence Vocalizer Embedded	win/lin/and/ios/legacy	Successor engine to Nuance Vocalizer Expressive; the upstream licensor behind Tiflotecnia Voices for NVDA, Runa TTS, Voxin and NextUp's voice store.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary, p	M
Code Factory — Eloquence for Windows / Voices for NVDA	win	Commercial SAPI 5 synthesizer exposing the ETI-Eloquence voices to any SAPI-consuming application, plus a Voices-for-NVDA add-on; the vendor has annou	local-only	commercial-l		commercial	V
Code Factory — Voices for NVDA (Eloquence + Vocalizer add-on) —	win	The voice pack a large share of NVDA users bought; Code Factory's own product page is now headed 'Not available anymore' and announces discontinuation	local-only	discontinued		Proprietary; w	M
Echogarden	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform speech toolset (CLI + Node library) bundling many synthesis, recognition, forced-alignment and translation engines.	hybrid	?	447	none declared	M
First Byte SmoothTalker / Monologue	win/legacy	1984 SmoothTalker and its later Monologue release - the engine behind Creative's Dr. Sbaitso and the default TTS bundled with early Sound Blaster soft	local-only	discontinued		proprietary; a	M
Genie-TTS	win/lin	GPT-SoVITS ONNX inference engine and model converter.	local-only	?	1	MIT	M
Google TTS For NVDA	win	NVDA synthesizer add-on exposing Google's Chrome WASM text-to-speech voices to the NVDA screen reader.	local-only	?	39	see repo	L
Kokoro-TTS-windows (mirbehnam)	win	'Easy-to-use, zero-setup Kokoro TTS for Windows ... with a simple web interface. Just unzip and run!'	local-only	active	94	Apache-2.0	M
KokoroSharp	win/lin/legacy	Local Kokoro inference engine for .NET via ONNX runtime, shipped as a plug-and-play NuGet package with all voices included.	local-only	?	236	see repo	L
Lernout & Hauspie speech assets (TruVoice, RealSpeak, TTS3000)	win/legacy	Belgian speech company whose engines sat under a large share of late-1990s TTS - including the Michael/Michelle voices Microsoft shipped in Office - a	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, l	M
Loquendo TTS (engine)	win/lin/legacy	Turin-based TTS engine spun out of Telecom Italia in 2001, sold to Nuance in 2011; TTS 7.20 had added Linux (SUSE 11, Ubuntu 10) and ALSA support shor	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, l	M
Nuance Vocalizer / Vocalizer Expressive (Nuance Communications →	win/lin/legacy	The engine name carried by a large share of AT voice packs; Nuance was acquired by Microsoft (deal announced 2021, closed 2022) and the enterprise Voc	hybrid	unknown		Proprietary OE	V
NVDA IBMTTS Driver	win	NVDA add-on maintaining a driver for IBMTTS, a synthesizer in the Eloquence family favoured by experienced screen-reader users for its speed.	local-only	?	76	see repo	L
OutLoud Text Reader (FairPlay137)	win	Open-source free Windows text reader written explicitly as a Speakonia successor; a 'Speakalive' revival project exists separately.	local-only	?	6	MIT	M
Piper-Read (jame25)	win	Lightweight C# GUI for Piper TTS on Windows.	local-only	?	20	check repo	L
PiperUI	win	Windows desktop GUI for Piper.	local-only	?	115	none declared	M
Read Aloud - Text to speech (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by aidoudxr; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
RHVoice	win/legacy	Free/open-source statistical-parametric synthesizer that plugs into the standard TTS interfaces on three platforms — SAPI5 on Windows, Speech Dispatch	local-only	?	1	GPL (voices un	M
sapi4out (bmonty)	win	'Install script and script wrapper around SAPI4' — keeps the pre-SAPI5 Microsoft voices usable.	os-native	unknown	0	unknown	L
SayIt	win	"A text-to-speech command line tool backed by Azure Cognitive Services." [vendor, repo description]	cloud-API	active	19	MIT	V
Sonata (mush42)	win/lin/legacy	Cross-platform Rust inference engine for neural TTS models (Piper), with C, Python and gRPC bindings and Sonic-based prosody control.	local-only	?	74	open source (s	M
Text to Speech - AI Voice Generator (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by NO FRIENDS LTD; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Text to Speech - Natural AI Voices (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by NxeCcde24 Labs; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Text to Speech - Text Reader (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by Rain Service; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Text to Speech Free (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by Free Software Tools; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Text to Speech Voice Reader (Microsoft Store)	win	Microsoft Store text-to-speech app published by Some Media Apps; surfaced through the winget/msstore manifestSearch index.	unknown	unknown		proprietary	L
Tiflotecnia Vocalizer voices for NVDA	win	Vocalizer driver add-on plus 100+ commercial Nuance/Cerence Vocalizer voices in 60+ languages, sold through NV Access as well as the vendor.	local-only	?		commercial	V
VOICEVOX ENGINE	win/mac/lin/legacy	The synthesis engine behind VOICEVOX, distributed as a standalone HTTP server; the project describes itself as the speech-synthesis engine of a free J	local-only	active	1	NOASSERTION on	M
VOICEVOX · COEIROINK · SHAREVOX · LMROID · TALQu · VOICEPEAK · 音	win/mac/lin/web	The Japanese-language consumer TTS engine cluster that English queries do not surface: free local neural engines (VOICEVOX, COEIROINK, SHAREVOX, LMROI	local-only	active		mixed (free-fo	L
Windows SAPI 5 (System.Speech.Synthesis / ISpVoice)	win	The classic desktop Windows speech interface: any SAPI 5 voice, driveable from PowerShell/.NET in two lines, with SpeakProgress events for word positi	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
Loquendo	ios/web	A speech-synthesis brand with strong recognition in Spanish-speaking markets; note that today's loquendo.io, loquendo.online and the App Store 'Loquen	cloud-API	unknown		proprietary	D
piper-app (IhorShevchuk)	ios/mac	Piper ported to iOS and macOS, packaged as an app.	local-only	?	52	GPL-3.0	L
chatterbox-tts-api	mac/win/lin	OpenAI-compatible local TTS API using Chatterbox.	local-only	?	661	AGPL-3.0	M
Chatterbox-TTS-Server	mac/win/lin	Self-hosted Chatterbox server with web UI and large-text chunking.	local-only	?	1	MIT	M
coqui-ai-TTS (idiap fork)	mac/win/lin	Maintained community fork of Coqui TTS by Idiap Research Institute.	local-only	?	2	MPL-2.0	M
Crane	mac/win/lin	Pure-Rust inference engine (Candle) for LLM, VLM, TTS and OCR.	local-only	?	448	MIT	L
ESPnet	mac/win/lin	End-to-end speech processing toolkit (ASR, TTS, SE, ST) with reproducible recipes.	local-only	?	9	Apache-2.0	M
flite (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"Small fast and portable speech synthesis system" [vendor] — CMU Flite.	local-only	active		MIT-Festival A	V
GPT-SoVITS	mac/win/lin	Few-shot voice cloning/TTS trainable from ~1 minute of audio; the highest-starred TTS repo in the sweep.	local-only	?	60	MIT	M
gTTS	mac/win/lin	Python library and CLI for Google Translate's TTS endpoint.	cloud-API	?	2	MIT	M
hibiki (upstream)	mac	Agent-first text-to-speech macOS app and CLI.	unknown	?	3	none declared	M
isimud-text-to-speech (crates.io)	mac	AI-native macOS menu-bar text-to-speech that also exposes itself as an MCP server for agents.	hybrid	?	,	unknown	L
Kitten-TTS-Server	mac/win/lin	Self-hosted Kitten TTS API server with a web UI.	local-only	?	272	MIT	M
kitten_tts_rs	mac/win/lin	Rust implementation of KittenTTS with a CLI and an API server.	local-only	?	311	none declared	M
KittenTTS	mac/win/lin	ONNX TTS family from 15M to 80M params, 25-80MB on disk, CPU-only, 8 built-in voices.	local-only	?	15	Apache-2.0	M
Kokoro (hexgrad)	mac/win/lin	Inference library for Kokoro-82M, an 82M-parameter Apache-2.0 TTS model.	local-only	?	8	Apache-2.0	M
kokoro-onnx	mac/win/lin	ONNX-runtime inference for Kokoro without PyTorch.	local-only	?	2	MIT	M
Kokoro-TTS-App (AlefAlfa)	mac	SwiftUI application providing offline TTS with Kokoro-82M.	local-only	?	4	MIT	L
KokoroVoice (kokoro-tts-macos)	mac	Registers Kokoro-82M as real macOS system voices through AVSpeechSynthesisProviderAudioUnit, so the built-in Speak Selection / VoiceOver pipeline spea	local-only	?		check repo	M
LocalAI	mac/win/lin	Self-hosted OpenAI-compatible engine covering LLMs, vision, image, video and voice including TTS.	local-only	?	48	MIT	M
macOS /usr/bin/say (Speech Synthesis Manager CLI)	mac	Apple's built-in TTS command: choose voice, set rate in words per minute, play to a chosen audio device or write an audio file, and optionally echo th	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
macOS AVSpeechSynthesizer / NSSpeechSynthesizer (AVFAudio)	mac/ios/legacy	The programmatic macOS/iOS speech API: same OS voice supply as say, plus per-utterance callbacks (willSpeakRangeOfSpeechString) that give the word r	os-native	?		proprietary (A	?
Marvis TTS	mac/win/lin	CSM-architecture on-device streaming TTS (250M backbone + 60M decoder), MLX/Apple-Silicon friendly.	local-only	?	366	Apache-2.0	M
MeloTTS	mac/win/lin	Fast multi-lingual CPU-realtime TTS library (EN/ES/FR/ZH/JP/KR).	local-only	?	7	MIT	M
mimic (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"Lightweight text-to-speech engine based on CMU Flite" [vendor] — Mycroft's engine.	local-only	active		MIT-Festival A	V
Moonshine	mac/win/lin	Very low-latency speech-to-text, intent recognition, and text-to-speech for voice interfaces.	local-only	?	10	NOASSERTION (m	M
NeuTTS (Air / Nano / 2E)	mac/win/lin	On-device TTS built on small LLM backbones, shipped in GGUF quantizations.	local-only	?	6	NOASSERTION (c	M
npm: @capacitor-community/text-to-speech	mac/win/lin	"Capacitor plugin for synthesizing speech from text." [vendor].	unknown	active		unknown	V
npm: expo-speech	mac/win/lin	"Provides text-to-speech functionality." [vendor].	unknown	active		unknown	V
npm: node-edge-tts	mac/win/lin	"node-edge-tts is a module that using Microsoft Edge's online TTS (Text [to Speech])" [vendor].	hybrid	active		unknown	V
npm: react-native-tts	mac/win/lin	"React Native Text-To-Speech module for Android and iOS" [vendor]; npm date 2024-06-14.	unknown	active		unknown	V
open-jtalk (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"Japanese text-to-speech system" [vendor].	local-only	active		modified BSD	V
OpenVoice	mac/win/lin	Instant voice cloning / tone-colour transfer (MIT + MyShell).	local-only	?	37	MIT	M
OuteTTS	mac/win/lin	Unified interface for OuteTTS models with GGUF/llama.cpp and ExLlama backends.	local-only	?	1	Apache-2.0	M
Picovoice Orca	mac/win/lin/legacy/and/ios	On-device streaming TTS engine designed to consume LLM token streams.	hybrid	?	143	Apache-2.0 (co	M
piper-rs	mac/win/lin	Use Piper TTS models from Rust.	local-only	?	58	none declared	M
Pocket TTS (PocketTTS.cpp)	mac/win/lin	Single-file C++ runtime for Pocket TTS over ONNX Runtime with voice cloning and streaming.	local-only	?	50	MIT	L
pocket-tts (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"Text-to-speech application designed to run efficiently on CPUs" [vendor] — from kyutai-labs.	local-only	active		MIT	V
pyttsx3	mac/win/lin	Offline Python TTS that drives the OS-native engines.	os-native	?	2	MPL-2.0	M
ReadSpeak	mac	"Enter any text and ReadSpeak will speak your text back to you in the accent that you choose! Over 100 different accents." [vendor]	os-native	dormant		proprietary	V
RealtimeTTS	mac/win/lin	Streaming TTS orchestration layer: feeds strings/generators/LLM token streams into ~25 pluggable engines with fallback.	hybrid	?	4	MIT	M
rs-voice-toolkit-tts	mac/win/lin	"Text-to-speech functionality for rs-voice-toolkit" [vendor, crates.io description] — Rust crate in a voice toolkit.	local-only	active		unknown	V
say (macOS command)	mac	macOS built-in command-line speech synthesizer: reads stdin, a string or a file with any installed system voice, and can write to an audio file.	os-native	?		Proprietary, b	D
sherpa-onnx	mac/win/lin/and/ios/legacy	ONNX-Runtime speech toolkit (STT, TTS, VAD, diarization) with bindings for ~10 languages and prebuilt binaries.	local-only	?	14	Apache-2.0	M
Silero models	mac/win/lin	Pre-trained TTS (and STT) models packaged to be trivially loadable via torch.hub.	local-only	?	6	NOASSERTION (p	M
Speak My Text	mac	"In order to speak a text, just copy it and paste it into the application... Feature to Pause and resume while the text is being Spoken... saving the	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
SpeakLine – Text to Speech	mac	"Type some text, select a voice, and your [device] reads it out loud... Import TXT or RTF files, Export your texts as a CAF audio file, SSML markup su	os-native	commercial-l		proprietary	V
speech (Homebrew formula)	mac/lin	"On-device speech toolkit for Apple Silicon: ASR, TTS, VAD, diarization" [vendor] — soniqo.audio.	local-only	active		Apache-2.0	V
Supertonic	mac/win/lin/ios/and/legacy	On-device ONNX TTS, ~99M params, 31 languages, SDK examples in 11 language runtimes.	local-only	?	13	MIT	M
tauri-plugin-tts	mac/win/lin	"Native text-to-speech plugin for Tauri with multi-language and voice selection" [vendor, crates.io description].	os-native	active		see repo	V
tauri-plugin-tts (crates.io)	mac/win/lin	Native text-to-speech plugin for Tauri with multi-language and voice selection — the synthesis layer several of the Tauri-based desktop readers in thi	os-native	?	7202	unknown	M
tortoise.cpp	mac/win/lin	ggml/C++ reimplementation of Tortoise.	local-only	?	193	MIT	M
TTS-ka	mac/win/lin	PyPI text-to-speech package surfaced by the site-scoped search; contents not read in this sweep.	unknown	unknown		unknown	L
TTS-WebUI	mac/win/lin	One Gradio+React WebUI with extensions for many TTS/audio models.	local-only	?	3	MIT	M
VibeASR.cpp	mac/win/lin	Edge CPU inference engine for VibeVoice-class models (BitNet).	local-only	?	106	MIT	L
VOICEPEAK	mac/win	"High quality text-to-speech software with emotional expression" [vendor] — commercial Japanese TTS studio app.	local-only	commercial-l		proprietary, p	V
Acapela Group	legacy/ios/and	Voice house supplying commercial TTS voices to assistive technology, including packaged voice add-ons for the NVDA screen reader, Chromebooks and Goog	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial per	M
Amazon Polly	legacy	AWS's TTS service with Standard/Neural/Long-Form/Generative voice tiers and Speech Marks (word/sentence/viseme timing metadata) - the timing feed a wo	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
Apple PlainTalk / MacinTalk	legacy	Apple's original speech stack - MacinTalk for synthesis (v1.0.2 dated 1985-04-15, used in the 1984 Macintosh introduction) and PlainTalk for recogniti	os-native	discontinued		proprietary, b	M
Azure AI Speech - Text to Speech (incl. F0 free tier)	legacy	Microsoft's neural TTS service with a permanently recurring free tier, word-boundary events, SSML, and an offline container/disconnected-deployment op	hybrid	?		proprietary Sa	M
Azure OpenAI Service - TTS deployments	legacy	OpenAI's TTS models served under an Azure subscription instead of an OpenAI one - same models, different billing, tenancy and data-residency posture.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
BlastBay Studios voices (Richard, Libby)	legacy	A two-voice commercial SAPI 5 range aimed at screen-reader users, with a serial number that is not hardware-locked.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary, s	M
Cartesia (Sonic)	legacy	Credit-metered low-latency TTS (Sonic-3.5) with a free tier, sold alongside STT and voice-agent products from the same credit pool.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
CereProc (CereVoice), now trading under Capacity	legacy/mac/lin	Scottish text-to-speech voice house whose SAPI voices are sold as add-on voices for third-party readers; supplier of the free Scottish voices distribu	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial per	M
CereProc / CereVoice (now trading under AI Software (Capacity) U	legacy/lin/mac	Edinburgh voice house behind CereVoice and the CereVoice Me voice-cloning service; acquired by Capacity on 10 July 2024, and cereproc.com now 301-redi	hybrid	commercial-l		Proprietary. c	M
CloudTTS	legacy	Minimal text-to-speech application: type or paste text, it reads it back.	unknown	?		unknown	L
DECtalk / FonixTalk (DEC -> Force Computers -> Fonix -> SpeechFX	legacy	Klatt-formant synthesiser released by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1984 as the US$4,000 DTC01 box; the voice family associated in popular memory w	local-only	discontinued		proprietary; c	M
Deepgram Aura-2 / Aura-1	legacy	Low-latency streaming TTS aimed at voice agents, priced per 1,000 characters with $200 of free starting credit and no credit card required.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
ElevenLabs Text to Speech API	legacy	Cloud neural TTS API (Multilingual v2/v3, Flash/Turbo) billed from a shared monthly credit pool; 1 credit per character on v2 Multilingual, 0.5-1 cred	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
eloquence_64 (fastfinge)	legacy	The 64-bit answer: launches a 32-bit host process (eloquence_host32.exe) to load the 32-bit-only Eloquence DLL and streams audio back to 64-bit NVDA.	local-only	active		Add-on code op	M
eloquence_threshold (pumper42nickel)	legacy	Community NVDA add-on that keeps ETI-Eloquence loadable on NVDA 2019.3 through 2025 — 32-bit NVDA only.	local-only	active		Add-on code is	M
Emerging TTS API vendors (Neuphonic, Smallest.ai, Sarvam AI, Cam	legacy	A long tail of newer per-character TTS APIs that surface constantly in 2026 comparison articles; each would need its own verification pass.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
Fish Audio (Fish Speech / S1 API)	legacy	Commercial API in front of the same lineage as the open fish-speech models, with instant cloning from ~10 seconds of audio.	hybrid	?		proprietary Sa	L
Freedom Scientific / Vispero synthesizer downloads (Vocalizer Ex	legacy	The JAWS/ZoomText/Fusion/MAGic voice channel: Vocalizer Expressive voices distributed by the screen-reader vendor itself, versioned against the host p	local-only	commercial-l		Bundled with t	M
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Standard / WaveNet / Neural2 / Stud	legacy	Per-character cloud TTS with a monthly recurring free allowance on every non-Gemini voice tier, plus prompt-steerable Gemini-TTS models billed per tok	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
Google Gemini Developer API - TTS models (ai.google.dev)	legacy	The AI-Studio-side Gemini API, where gemini-2.5-flash-preview-tts and gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview are listed as FREE OF CHARGE on the free tier - a d	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
Groq TTS (PlayAI Dialog, then Canopy Labs Orpheus)	legacy	TTS served on Groq's LPU inference cloud - fast and cheap, but its model lineup has already turned over once after the PlayAI shutdown.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
Hear2Read	legacy/and	Free Indic-language and English voices for NVDA and Android, named on NV Access's extra-voices page.	local-only	unknown		described as f	L
Hume AI - Octave TTS	legacy	LLM-based TTS steered by natural-language emotional prompts instead of SSML prosody tags, with a small recurring free character allowance.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
IBM ViaVoice Outloud / ETI-Eloquence	legacy/lin	IBM's formant TTS engine - small on disk, small in memory, very fast - shipped as ViaVoice Outloud (including a Linux release in 1999) and as ETI-Eloq	local-only	discontinued	5	proprietary, l	M
IBM watsonx Text to Speech	legacy	IBM's long-running TTS cloud service, also shippable as a customizable container into Red Hat OpenShift - one of the few majors with a documented self	hybrid	?		proprietary Sa	?
Inworld TTS (Realtime TTS-1 / TTS-2)	legacy	Low-latency TTS marketed at $5-$15 per million characters, positioned as the migration target for shut-down PlayHT workloads.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	?
IVONA (ivona.com) — the original service	legacy	Polish TTS house bought by Amazon; ivona.com now carries a single line saying Amazon Polly replaced the IVONA Speech Cloud, dated © 2019.	cloud-API	discontinued		Proprietary; o	M
Kokoro-FastAPI (remsky)	legacy	Dockerised FastAPI wrapper around Kokoro-82M with CPU/AMD/NVIDIA support, voice mixing, auto-stitching and captioned timestamps.	local-only	?	5	see repo	L
Kokoros (lucasjinreal)	legacy	Kokoro reimplemented in Rust for fast realtime synthesis.	local-only	?	806	see repo	L
LMNT	legacy	Low-cost streaming TTS with a free Playground tier and per-character overage that drops with plan size.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud endpoint (unofficial; used by edge-tts	legacy	The undocumented WebSocket endpoint behind Edge's Read Aloud, reachable with no account and no API key - and repeatedly broken by Microsoft-side chang	cloud-API	?	11	LGPL-3.0 for t	M
Microsoft Sam, Mike, Mary, Anna (and the Michael/Michelle L&H vo	legacy	The bundled Windows voice line: Sam as the default on Windows 2000/XP with Mike and Mary as optional downloads, Michael and Michelle licensed from Ler	os-native	discontinued		proprietary, b	M
MiniMax Speech (Speech-02 HD / Turbo, Speech 2.x)	legacy	Chinese-lab TTS family with HD and Turbo tiers, resold through several inference marketplaces at lower headline rates than MiniMax's own list price.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
mlx-audio	legacy	TTS/STT/STS library on Apple's MLX framework.	local-only	?	7	MIT	M
mlx-speech	legacy	Pure-MLX speech synthesis, cloning, dialogue and ASR for Apple Silicon.	local-only	?	36	MIT	L
Murf AI API (Falcon / Studio-quality)	legacy	API arm of the Murf voiceover studio, split into a cheap conversational model and a pricier studio-quality model.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
naskopw/read_aloud	legacy	Cross-platform text-to-speech library.	unknown	?	4	see repo	L
NVIDIA Riva / NIM TTS (Magpie-TTS)	legacy	NVIDIA's self-hosted speech stack: TTS models pulled from NGC and deployed as containers/NIM microservices on your own GPU, plus a hosted trial endpoi	hybrid	?		NVIDIA AI Ente	L
OpenAI Audio Speech API (gpt-4o-mini-tts, tts-1, tts-1-hd)	legacy	OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech endpoint: 13 built-in voices, chunked-transfer streaming, and an 'instructions' field that steers accent/emotion/speed on gp	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	?
OpenTTS	legacy	'Open Text to Speech Server' [vendor] — one HTTP API in front of several synthesis engines and many languages, distributed as a Docker image.	local-only	archived	1	MIT	M
OptiSpeech (mush42)	legacy	Lightweight end-to-end TTS model designed for fast on-device inference.	local-only	?	130	open source (s	L
Parler-TTS	legacy	Hugging Face's text-to-speech model steered by natural-language descriptions of the desired voice.	local-only	?	5	Apache-2.0	L
parrot (rishiskhare)	legacy	Free, offline, private AI text-to-speech desktop app built in Rust.	local-only	?	132	see repo	L
Regional cloud TTS majors (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu,	legacy	The non-Western hyperscaler TTS services - relevant only if language coverage or data residency points that way; none was measured in this pass.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
Resemble AI	legacy	Voice-cloning-first vendor with on-premises deployment and deepfake-detection tooling, positioned at enterprise rather than per-character consumer pri	hybrid	?		proprietary Sa	L
Rime (Mist / Coda)	legacy	Usage-priced TTS with very low time-to-first-audio (37-96 ms P50 claimed), word-level timestamps on one model, and a self-host option on enterprise pl	hybrid	?		proprietary Sa	?
Runa TTS (AccessMind)	legacy	A 2025 entrant selling Cerence Vocalizer voices as an NVDA add-on with a voice-download manager, three-device personal licence and offline operation.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary. V	V
S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth)	legacy	JavaScript reimplementation of the 1982 Commodore 64 speech synthesizer.	local-only	?		open source	L
sherpa-onnx TTS Engine (k2-fsa)	legacy/lin/win/mac/ios	Next-gen Kaldi's ONNX runtime for speech, shipping prebuilt Android APKs that register as the Android system TTS engine and run Piper/Coqui/other mode	local-only	?	5	Apache-2.0	M
SoftVoice, Inc. (SVTTS; successor to Don't Ask Software / SAM)	legacy/win	Long-lived formant TTS vendor whose engine shipped inside pwWebSpeak and whose corporate lineage owns the 1982 Commodore 64 Software Automatic Mouth c	local-only	dormant		proprietary; t	L
Sonata NVDA add-on (sonata-nvda)	legacy	NVDA speech-synthesizer driver that lets the NVDA screen reader speak through neural TTS models, Piper in particular.	local-only	?	71	GPL-2.0	M
speaches	legacy	Self-hosted OpenAI-API-compatible speech server covering text-to-speech alongside transcription and translation [vendor]; documentation at speaches.ai	local-only	active	3	MIT	M
speak.js	legacy	eSpeak compiled to JavaScript via Emscripten - TTS entirely in the browser.	local-only	?	1	GPL-3.0	M
SpeechifyAI API (api.speechify.ai, Simba models)	legacy	The API arm of Speechify: an OpenAI-shaped /v1/audio/speech endpoint with Simba 3.x streaming models, SSML emotion control and self-serve voice clonin	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	M
StreamingKokoroJS	legacy	Unlimited text-to-speech running entirely in the browser with Kokoro-JS, fully local and open source.	local-only	?	348	see repo	L
The Scottish Voice	legacy/mac	Publicly funded set of Scottish-accented SAPI voices (Stuart, Heather, Callum, Isla, Andrew, Mairi, and Gaelic Ceitidh) given free to Scottish schools	local-only	active		Free to Scotti	M
Tiflotecnia Voices for NVDA 4.0 (Cerence Embedded TTS)	legacy	The successor path for users stranded by Code Factory: a licensed Cerence Embedded TTS driver for NVDA, built for Tiflotecnia by AccessMind, with a di	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary pe	M
Tiflotecnia — Eloquence SAPI5	legacy	Code Factory's Eloquence resold with Tiflotecnia support — the other half of NV Access's 'Eloquence is still available as a SAPI 5 voice' answer.	local-only	commercial-l		Proprietary; p	M
transformers.js	legacy	Run HF transformers models in the browser/Node via ONNX Runtime Web - includes TTS models.	local-only	?	16	Apache-2.0	M
TTSMaker	legacy	Free browser-based text-to-speech site supporting many languages and voice styles, with ebook reading and MP3 export.	cloud-API	?		Proprietary, f	L
Unreal Speech	legacy	Budget TTS API advertising per-word timestamps, 300 ms streaming and a 250K-character free allowance - the timestamps matter if you want word highligh	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	?
Verbio Technologies	legacy	Spanish speech-technology vendor (TTS and ASR) whose own site claims multilingual coverage across 250 languages for its adaptation and translation ser	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Vocalizer Expressive 2.2 for NVDA (Blind Help Project redistribu	legacy	A community-maintained redistribution of the Nuance Vocalizer Expressive NVDA driver, still being updated in 2026 — with a licensing position this swe	local-only	active		unresolved — s	L
voice-desk-tts	legacy	Browser-first Piper TTS workspace for testing voices, previewing output and exporting WAV.	local-only	?	42	NOASSERTION	M
Voxin (Oralux.org)	legacy	The commercial-voice route for LINUX screen readers: a not-for-profit association sells Cerence TTS / Vocalizer Embedded / IBM TTS packaged as speech-	local-only	dormant		Proprietary vo	M
Voxygen	legacy	French text-to-speech vendor offering voicebot, alerting, educational and brand-voice synthesis. [lang: French and others; English UI: yes]	cloud-API	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Web Speech API - SpeechSynthesis (browser speechSynthesis)	legacy	The browser's built-in speech controller - getVoices, speak, pause, resume, cancel, plus utterance boundary events - and therefore the zero-dependency	hybrid	?		web standard (	M
WellSaid Labs	legacy	Studio-oriented synthetic-voice vendor aimed at corporate narration; seat/subscription pricing rather than per-character API metering.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
WhisperSpeech	legacy	Open-source text-to-speech built by inverting Whisper, from Collabora.	local-only	?	4	MIT	L
Willow Inference Server	legacy	'Open source, local, and self-hosted highly optimized language inference server supporting ASR/S...' [vendor, description truncated on the API respons	local-only	active	510	Apache-2.0	M
Windows 11 Narrator natural voices (on-device neural)	legacy	Downloadable on-device neural voices, far better than the legacy Zira/David set - but Microsoft has scoped them to Narrator, and third-party apps are	os-native	?		proprietary (p	?
Windows.Media.SpeechSynthesis.SpeechSynthesizer (OneCore / WinRT	legacy	The modern WinRT synthesis class: SynthesizeTextToStreamAsync / SynthesizeSsmlToStreamAsync returning a stream you play yourself; exposes the OneCore	os-native	?		proprietary (p	M
Yandex SpeechKit	legacy	Yandex Cloud's TTS/STT service; strong Russian-language coverage, and the pricing docs did not render for the scraper in this pass.	cloud-API	?		proprietary Sa	L
jstts	web	'A fully client-side, JavaScript-only Text-to-Speech (TTS) service using eSpeakNG. No server-side' — WASM eSpeak NG in the browser.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	V

catalogue-outofband.md

Catalogue — Found during the sweep, does not serve this use case — kept, not discarded

96 entries. Evidence tier: M measured (source read) · V vendor claim · L lead, unverified · D derived.

Acq = acquisition mechanism. Clipboard = does reading a selection clobber your clipboard. Superlatives appearing in these cells sit inside attributed quotations; the catalogue does not rank.

Tool	Plat	What it is	Runtime	Status	Stars	Licence	Ev
Speak-Selection (derek1906, Android)	and	Android app mimicking the iOS 'Speak Selection' button.	os-native	?	9	check repo	L
SpeakThat	and	Android notification reader that speaks incoming notifications aloud.	local-only	?	126	see repo	L
fittsmon / fittsmon-gui (muzlabz GitLab, linux-bird Codeberg)	X11	'Set mouse hot edges events for x11' — a Fitts's-law mouse utility that keyword-matches 'tts' and appears in every naive TTS sweep; the Codeberg copie	local-only	unknown	1	unknown	M
clipboard-watcher (slobbe)	lin	'A GNOME Shell extension that shows the current clipboard contents' — no speech.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
computer-use-linux (agent-sh)	lin	Linux desktop control over MCP using AT-SPI, GNOME Shell, Wayland portals and ydotool - a worked inventory of every Linux acquisition and input route	local-only	active	366		L
Dasher (SourceForge record)	lin/win/mac	'Dasher is a data entry interface incorporating language modelling and driven by continuous two-dimensional gestures'; the SF page redirects developme	local-only	dormant		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
DiffSinger	lin	Singing voice synthesis via shallow diffusion (also does TTS).	local-only	?	4	MIT	M
dograh	lin/legacy	Self-hosted voice-AI platform (alternative to Vapi/Retell) with BYOK speech-to-speech.	hybrid	?	5	NOASSERTION	M
fairseq	lin	Meta's seq2seq toolkit - the home of MMS-TTS (1100+ language TTS models).	local-only	?	32	MIT	M
FreeRDP	lin/win/mac	Open-source RDP client/library - listed because the remote-desktop transport is what determines whether remote text is text or pixels.	local-only	?	13	Apache-2.0	D
gnome-say	lin	GitHub repository whose description reads 'GNOME Shell extension to speak clipboard contents aloud'; the repository contains a LICENSE file and nothin	unknown	dormant	0	GPL-3.0	M
gok (GNOME On-screen Keyboard)	lin	'GOK is an on-screen keyboard. An alternative to the mouse/keyboard input system (for unix-like systems with GNOME libraries.)'	local-only	dormant		LGPL-2.0 (SF c	V
manga-image-translator	lin/win/mac	Detects, OCRs, translates and re-renders text inside manga/comic images.	hybrid	?	10	GPL-3.0	M
manga-ocr	lin/win/mac	Specialized Japanese-manga OCR model.	local-only	?	2	Apache-2.0	M
MockingBird	lin/win	Clone a voice in 5 seconds to generate arbitrary speech in real time (Chinese-focused SV2TTS).	local-only	?	36	NOASSERTION	M
Moshi	lin/mac	Full-duplex spoken dialogue foundation model.	local-only	?	10	Apache-2.0	M
piper (Foozoori, Codeberg)	lin	'GTK application to configure gaming devices' — a name collision with Piper TTS that any keyword sweep will surface.	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	M
Real-Time-Voice-Cloning	lin/win	Clone a voice in 5 seconds (SV2TTS); the repo that popularized voice cloning.	local-only	?	60	MIT	M
Speaker-selection / diarization repos (Speaker_selection_pipelin	lin	Repos about choosing which SPEAKER (person or voice) to use, not about reading a screen selection.	local-only	?	0	mixed	M
Unit-selection TTS research repos (unit_selection_tts, Google2St	lin	Academic implementations of concatenative 'unit selection' speech synthesis.	local-only	?	11	mixed	M
Vocalinux	lin	Linux dictation project documenting IBus/Wayland/suspend reliability work, including a ydotool clipboard-paste fallback for non-ASCII characters.	local-only	unknown		unknown	V
vocalinux / handy-realtime / eustoma / voice-2-clipboard (Codebe	lin/win	Cluster of offline speech-to-text tools found in the same Codeberg sweep: vocalinux (Linux, whisper.cpp), handy-realtime, eustoma (faster-whisper + QF	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
VoxForge	lin/win	'VoxForge collects user-submitted speech audio files for the creation of Acoustic Models for Free and Open Source Speech Recognition Engines such as H	local-only	dormant		GPL-2.0 (SF ca	V
vui	lin	Real-time voice assistant with WebRTC streaming, faster-whisper ASR, local LLM and a small TTS.	local-only	?	741	NOASSERTION	M
yazses	lin/mac/win	"Local, offline voice dictation for Linux, macOS, and Windows — hold [a key to dictate]" [vendor, PyPI title].	local-only	unknown		unknown	L
ClonEpub-Pocket	win/mac/lin	Voice-cloning ePub reader, built because the author disliked an audiobook narrator.	local-only	?	35	none declared	M
deepfake-tts-windows-tool	win	Repository whose README is a stated plan for a Windows right-click shell extension that would read highlighted text with a user-supplied voice-clone m	unknown	dormant	0	none declared	M
Document/PDF-to-audio batch converters (PDF_OCR_TTS, ocr-tts var	win/mac/lin	Scripts that convert a PDF or scanned document to text and then to an audio file, offline and in batch.	local-only	?	0	mixed	M
Dr. Sbaitso (Creative Labs, 1991)	win	Sound Blaster's bundled 'doctor' chatbot demo, whose speech was a build of First Byte's Monologue engine; the acronym expands to SoundBlaster Acting I	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, b	M
espanso	win/mac/lin	Cross-platform text expander in Rust with a system-wide keystroke listener and per-platform input backends (X11, Wayland-with-caveats, Win32, macOS).	local-only	active	14242		L
FastPlay	win	Fast, accessible Windows audio player with tempo/pitch shifting and screen-reader accessibility.	local-only	?	14	none declared	M
FlaUI-MCP (shanselman)	win	MCP server for Windows desktop automation using FlaUI over UI Automation.	local-only	active	74		L
Game accessibility mod cluster (Tolk/UniversalSpeech-based)	win	A large and fast-growing family of per-game mods that speak menus and dialogue through a running screen reader - dozens of repos, typically 1-15 stars	local-only	?	1	mixed (MIT, GP	M
Hotkey dictation cluster (opentypeless, koe, typeflux, vocamac,	win/mac/lin	A large, high-star 2026 cluster of speech-TO-text tools: hold a hotkey, speak, and transcribed text is pasted at the cursor.	local-only	?	440	mixed (MIT / A	M
hunt-and-peck (zsims)	win	Vimium-style keyboard navigation for Windows applications built on the UI Automation framework - a demonstration that UIA can enumerate on-screen text	local-only	dormant	803		L
mcp-windows (sbroenne)	win	Lets agents control Windows applications by UI Automation element name rather than coordinates.	local-only	active	76		L
MORT	win	Korean real-time game screen translator using OCR.	hybrid	?	1	MIT	M
OCR-Translator (tomkam1702)	win	Real-time game subtitle translator with AI-powered OCR and context-aware translation.	hybrid	?	69	NOASSERTION	M
pyvideotrans	win/lin/mac	Translates video and embeds dubbing and subtitles.	hybrid	?	18	GPL-3.0	M
Speekaboo	win/lin	Drop-in replacement for Speaker.bot using Piper TTS.	local-only	?	8	MIT	M
stardew-access	win/mac/lin	Accessibility mod for Stardew Valley with screen-reader and keyboard-only support.	local-only	?	99	GPL-3.0	M
Sunshine + Moonlight (self-hosted game streaming)	win/lin/legacy	'Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight' [vendor] paired with the Moonlight client; a low-latency video+audio pixel stream.	local-only	active	40	GPL-3.0 (both)	M
TTS overlays for gaming and streaming (autohotkey-tts-overlay, i	win	Hotkey-driven TTS overlays that pipe synthesized speech into a virtual audio cable for voice chat, streams and soundboards.	local-only	?	1	mixed (MIT / G	M
TTS Voice Wizard	win	"Speech to Text to Speech. Song now playing. Sends text as OSC messages to VRChat to display on avatar." [vendor]	hybrid	active	795	MIT	V
voice-pro (abus-aikorea)	win/legacy	Gradio web UI bundling Edge-TTS and Kokoro with zero-shot cloning and dubbing workflows - a creator studio, not a reader.	hybrid	?	12	see repo	?
win-speak-selection	win	GitHub repository whose description promises 'Read selected text aloud on Windows with a hotkey — macOS Speak Selection (Option+Esc) equivalent using	unknown	dormant	0	none declared	M
Window-Eyes	win	A once-major commercial Windows screen reader (GW Micro, later Ai Squared/Vispero), discontinued in 2017 with users directed to JAWS.	local-only	discontinued		proprietary, d	D
AssistiveWare (Proloquo4Text / Proloquo2Go)	ios	AAC product line for iOS including text-based and symbol-based communication apps with natural voices and word prediction.	local-only	?		Proprietary, p	L
audiblez	mac/win/lin	Generates audiobooks from e-books using Kokoro.	local-only	?	8	MIT	M
AudioCupcake	mac	"Master your audiobook narration and podcasts" [vendor] — audiobook/podcast production tool.	unknown	commercial-l		proprietary	V
Claude Code / AI-agent narration tools (auto-speech, claude-tts-	mac/win/lin	Tools that speak an AI coding agent's responses aloud via hooks, rather than reading arbitrary screen content.	local-only	?	0	mixed	M
claude-sonar	mac/lin/win	A screen-reader accessibility plugin for Claude Code - makes a specific developer TUI legible to a screen reader.	local-only	?	11	MIT	M
claude-tts / claude-code-narrator / jarvis-line / virgo	mac/lin/win	A cluster of plugins that speak an AI coding agent's output aloud (Claude Code, OpenCode, Gemini CLI), via ElevenLabs/OpenAI/Polly/Azure/local system	hybrid	?	27	varies	L
clawdcursor (AmrDab)	mac	Compiles what is on screen into one map by fusing the accessibility tree with OCR into addressable elements.	local-only	active	392		L
ebook2audiobook	mac/win/lin	Batch converts e-books into audiobooks with voice cloning across 1158+ languages.	local-only	?	19	Apache-2.0	M
epub_to_audiobook	mac/win/lin	EPUB to audiobook converter optimized for Audiobookshelf.	hybrid	?	2	MIT	M
GLaDOS	mac/win/lin	Real-time voice assistant personality core (STT + LLM + TTS loop).	local-only	?	5	MIT	M
Handy	mac/win/lin	Free, offline speech-to-TEXT app (the inverse direction).	local-only	?	29	NOASSERTION	L
Hark	mac/ios	Example text-to-speech app for macOS/iOS in Swift.	os-native	?	185	none declared	M
holdtranscribe	mac/win/lin	"Hotkey-Activated Voice-to-Clipboard Transcriber" [vendor, PyPI title] — hold a key, speak, get text on the clipboard.	hybrid	unknown		unknown	L
Loupe (smughead)	mac	macOS accessibility inspector that hovers, annotates and copies structured output.	local-only	active	108		L
MoneyPrinterTurbo	mac/win/lin	Generates short videos from a topic or keyword with an automated AI workflow; TTS is one internal step.	hybrid	?	102	MIT	M
OpenUtau	mac/win/lin	Open singing-synthesis platform (UTAU successor).	local-only	?	4	MIT	M
Voxista (kleinschmidt)	mac	'Local dictation for macOS — press a hotkey, speak, get polished text. 100% offline' (whisper.cpp).	local-only	unknown	0	unknown	L
abogen (denizsafak/abogen)	legacy	Generates audiobooks with synchronized captions from EPUBs, PDFs and text files.	local-only	?	5618	MIT	M
AlternativeTo (alternativeto.net) — blocked surface	legacy	Crowd-maintained 'alternatives to X' database — the canonical structured source for 'what else is like this tool', and a source class neither round qu	cloud-API	active		n/a	M
Asterics AAC	legacy/and/win/lin	Free offline-capable AAC app with flexible input options, media and smart-home integration.	hybrid	?	116	AGPL	M
AwesomeTTS (AwesomeTTS/awesometts-anki-addon, now Vocab-Apps/ank	legacy	The older Anki text-to-speech add-on: batch-generate audio for a deck or speak on the fly during review.	hybrid	?	501	GPL-3.0	M
C-Pen Reader 3 / C-Pen Exam Reader 2	legacy	Contact scanning pens that read a swiped LINE of printed text aloud; the Exam Reader variant is deliberately stripped for invigilated exams.	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial har	M
C-Pen Reader 3 / IRISPen Reader 8 (reading pens)	legacy	Handheld pens marketed for dyslexia that scan a line of printed text and read it aloud through a built-in speaker or headphones, with dictionary looku	local-only	?		commercial	V
Cboard	legacy/and/ios	Open-source AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) system with text-to-speech for the browser; the free counterpart to the AssistiveWare pro	hybrid	?	746	GPL-3.0	M
Dictionariez (pnlpal/dictionariez)	legacy	Dictionary extension with double-click word lookup in 20+ languages that also pronounces the looked-up word and integrates with Anki.	hybrid	?	664	GPL-2.0	M
ebook2audiobookpiper-tts	legacy	Converts ebooks into audiobooks using piper-tts.	local-only	?	108	see repo	L
Global AutoCorrect (LexAble, now sold via Texthelp)	legacy	Real-time spelling correction that works across Windows applications; on the DSA list it is bundled into both ClaroRead and Read&Write as 'AutoCorrect	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial; DS	M
hass-edge-tts	legacy	Home Assistant TTS integration on the Edge endpoint - listed to show where this engine supply actually gets consumed.	cloud-API	?	485	see repo	?
HyperTTS (Vocab-Apps/anki-hyper-tts)	legacy	Anki add-on that generates speech for flashcard fields, either batched into the collection or realtime during review, across many free and paid TTS se	hybrid	?	275	GPL-3.0	M
Interactron: Embodied Adaptive Object Detection — Kotar & Mottag	legacy	Object-detection method for an embodied agent that adapts its detector at test time while moving through a physical 3D environment.	local-only	dormant		research code	M
IRISPen Reader 8 / IRISPen Air 8 (I.R.I.S., Canon Group)	legacy	Canon-group scanning pens with an LCD touchscreen, offline OCR and text-to-speech; Reader 8 is standalone, Air 8 adds translation.	local-only	commercial-l		Commercial har	M
minecraft-access	legacy	Minecraft Java mod (Fabric/NeoForge) that makes the game playable by visually impaired players, including speech output.	local-only	?	92	see repo	L
obs-wayland-hotkeys (leia-uwu)	legacy	OBS Studio plugin that retrofits GlobalShortcuts-portal hotkeys onto OBS on Wayland - a worked example of an existing app that lost global hotkeys in	local-only	active	97	GPL-2.0	M
pdf-narrator (mateogon/pdf-narrator)	legacy	Converts PDFs and EPUBs into audiobook files with configurable TTS settings and text extraction tuned for low-resource machines.	local-only	?	200	MIT	M
PixelTone — Laput et al., CHI 2013	legacy	Multimodal photo-editing interface combining spoken natural-language commands with sketching to localise the edit to a region.	local-only	dormant		research proto	M
PlayHT / PlayAI (Play Dialog) - SHUT DOWN	legacy	A widely-integrated TTS vendor that no longer exists: Meta acquired the team in July 2025, the API went dark that month, and the platform sunset on 31	cloud-API	?		n/a	?
ReCalibri	legacy	Browser extension that swaps Times New Roman for accessible typefaces (Calibri, Aptos, Open Sans, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, OpenDyslexic).	local-only	?		unknown	L
Scanmarker Reader / Pro / Max (Scanmarker)	legacy	Scanning pens whose distinguishing move is routing OCR text to a WEB APP on your computer or phone (app.scanmarker.com) where it is read aloud and res	hybrid	commercial-l		Commercial har	M
Scoop (Windows) and nixpkgs — measured-thin registries	legacy	Two package registries round 2's registry angle did not query. Probed here: nixpkgs by-name contains speechd, speech-tools, tts, blightmud-tts and spe	local-only	active		n/a	M
Simon (KDE)	legacy	KDE's speech RECOGNITION application (speech to text), the inverse direction from this use case.	local-only	discontinued	42	GPL	M
Speechify for VS Code (hddevteam/speechify)	legacy	VS Code extension built on Azure Speech Services with 200+ voices; as of 3.0 it is positioned as a script-to-video production tool inside the editor.	cloud-API	?	6	MIT	M
Tactual	legacy	Screen-reader navigation cost analyzer — models the effort an assistive-technology user spends reaching interactive web content, under five AT profile	local-only	?		unknown	L
Talking Moose	legacy	Steven Halls' 1986 Macintosh desk accessory - the first animated talking agent on a personal computer - which popped up and said prepared jokes throug	local-only	active		originally sha	M
TTS-Story	legacy	Web-based multi-voice TTS studio turning tagged scripts into audiobooks, with speaker management, a job queue and many local/API backends.	hybrid	?	308	see repo	L
WebAnywhere	legacy	A research web-based screen reader that ran in the browser with no install, so a blind user could get speech on any machine.	hybrid	?		open source (r	L
XivVoices	legacy	Final Fantasy XIV plugin that voices in-game dialogue with TTS.	local-only	?	37	see repo	L
Bitbucket public repository search (removed surface)	?	Bitbucket's public repository-listing and search endpoints now return 'CHANGE-2770 - Functionality has been deprecated', so no unauthenticated enumera	unknown	discontinued		n/a	M
Gitee and Pagure (thin surfaces)	?	Pagure (Fedora's forge) yielded only speech-tools, RHVoice and a BlindReader IoT toy across six patterns; Gitee's v5 search API returned an empty arra	unknown	unknown		n/a	M
SourceForge directory search (blocked surface)	?	SourceForge's category and keyword directory pages returned HTTP 403 (Cloudflare) to every request from this environment, including with full browser	unknown	unknown		n/a	M