macOS includes a spoken content feature that reads selected text aloud. Highlight a paragraph in Safari, right-click, and your Mac speaks it. The feature works well — until you need to hear text that can't be highlighted. An infographic with key statistics. A scanned document with no text layer. Subtitles baked into a video frame. Text rendered as a graphic on a web app. In all these cases, macOS spoken content has nothing to work with because there's no selectable text to feed it.
Most Screen Text Isn't Selectable
The amount of non-selectable text on a modern Mac screen is larger than most people realize. Images with text overlays, canvas-rendered web apps, PDF scans, video frames, remote desktop sessions, dialog boxes, app interfaces with custom-rendered labels — all of these display readable text that macOS treats as part of an image. You can see it, you can read it with your eyes, but you can't select it, so you can't send it to the speech engine.
For users who rely on audio output for accessibility, proofreading, multitasking, or language learning, this gap is a real barrier. The text is on screen, the speech engine is on the same machine, but there's no bridge between them for non-selectable content.
Select Anything on Screen, Hear It Aloud
Optic closes this gap by combining screen-level OCR with text-to-speech. Activate it from the menu bar, drag a selection over any visible text — regardless of source — and Optic recognizes the characters. You can then have the captured text read aloud, turning any visible screen content into audio.
Accessibility
Screen readers like VoiceOver work well with native UI elements and standard text, but stumble on text inside images and non-standard rendering. Optic fills this gap by making any visible text available as both clipboard text and spoken audio. Content that was previously inaccessible becomes hearable.
Proofreading
Hearing text read aloud catches errors that visual scanning misses. After extracting text from a scanned document or image, use text-to-speech to verify the OCR output. A garbled word or misrecognized character is immediately obvious when spoken but might pass unnoticed on screen.
Multitasking and Comprehension
Extract a long passage from a document, article, or scanned page and listen to it while doing other work. Audio processing engages different cognitive channels than reading, which can aid comprehension and retention — especially for dense or unfamiliar material. Every capture stays in your menu bar history, so you can revisit and replay any previous extraction.