I wanted a listen button on this blog.
Not a complicated ask. Some people take words in better through their ears than their eyes. I am one of them. Building a blog that only works if you can comfortably read a screen felt like exactly the thing I spend my working life telling other people not to do.
So I went looking for a tool.
what the market sells you
There is a whole category of product waiting for someone in my position. One line of code. Drops onto every page. Read-aloud, bigger text, contrast options, a tidy little accessibility icon in the corner.
They are called overlays. And the pitch is very good, because the pitch is aimed exactly at people who are tired.
Here is what I found instead.
In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission fined one of the biggest overlay companies a million dollars. The complaint said the product had been marketed as making any website compliant with accessibility guidelines, and that it did not. Not menus. Not form fields. Not image descriptions. The basics. The exact things a screen reader user needs.
And the bit that actually landed for me: hundreds of businesses running these widgets got sued anyway. They bought the badge. They thought they were covered. They weren't, because a screen reader reads the source code before the widget's JavaScript has finished doing anything at all.
So the widget doesn't fix the site. It sits on top of the site, looking like a fix.
why this one stung
I could have installed it. Nobody would have known.
Except I sell accessibility readiness audits. I walk into schools and organisations and ask them to look honestly at the gap between what they've bought and what actually reaches a child. The gap between the badge and the thing.
And I'd have had the badge in my own corner.
That's not a compliance problem. That's a whose-side-are-you-on problem.
the second option
There's a proper version. Real product, no false claims, genuinely excellent voices — the kind that sound like a person reading rather than a satnav having a bad day.
Twenty-two dollars a month.
Which is not a lot of money, unless you are a solo parent running a part-time business and deliberately keeping your fixed costs low so the business survives the months when you can't work much. Then it's another line on the list. Another thing that renews whether or not you wrote anything.
I sat with that for about a day, and then got annoyed enough to look at what was actually underneath it.
what was underneath it
Every browser already has a speech engine in it.
Your phone has one. Your laptop has one. It's the thing that reads your texts out in the car. On an iPhone it's the Siri voice. On Edge it's Microsoft's natural voices. They are, genuinely, good now — the robotic thing is a memory of a decade ago that we all still carry around.
And it's free. Not free-trial free. There is nothing to buy, because it's already installed on the device of every single person who visits.
So that's what I built. A listen button that hands the words to your own device and lets your own voice read them.
the two things nobody tells you
I'm putting these here because I spent a while finding them and someone else shouldn't have to.
Chrome stops talking after about fifteen seconds. If you hand the browser one long block of text, Safari reads the whole thing and Chrome cuts out mid-sentence. It's a known bug, years old. The fix is to chop the text into sentences and feed them through one at a time, so no single piece ever runs long enough to trip it.
It will read your navigation menu. Left alone, the thing starts at the top of the page and reads every link in your header, then the cookie line, then whatever's in your footer, before it reaches a single word you actually wrote. You have to point it at the article and only the article.
Both of those are ten minutes of work once you know. Neither is in the shiny documentation.
the honest caveat
Mine isn't better than the paid one at everything.
The voice depends on the listener's device, and I can't control that. On an iPhone or a Mac or Edge it sounds lovely. On an old Android it might still sound like a satnav. The paid product would sound the same everywhere, because it does the generating at their end.
That's the trade. I chose control and zero cost over consistency, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend the free thing won on every axis.
what i'd say to anyone else looking
The widget is not the accessibility. The widget is the feeling of having done the accessibility.
Those are different, and the difference shows up in exactly one place: whether a person can use the thing.
If you're about to buy the button, spend the twenty minutes first. Find out what's already in the device in your hand. It's often more than you were told.
You can test this one. There's a listen button at the top of this post.
