Read a PDF aloud, on every device

Can you have a PDF read aloud for free?

Yes: iPhone, Android, Mac, Chromebooks, Microsoft Edge and Acrobat Reader all have a free, built-in read-aloud feature. Their limits are mostly the voice, often the system's, and how easy it is to follow a long text.

An online reader like Readotte adds more natural voices, highlights the spoken word and resumes where you stopped, free for about 10 minutes of listening a day.

How do you read a PDF aloud on iPhone or iPad?

Turn on Speak Screen in Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak (Spoken Content on some iOS versions), then open the PDF in Books, Files or Safari and swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. The iPhone reads all the text shown and scrolls the page; a controller lets you pause and change the rate.

Speak Selection, in the same place, reads only the selected passage. Either way the iPhone reads the screen as it is, page numbers and notes included, sometimes stops at a page change, and doesn't remember where you stopped.

• Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak.
• Turn on Speak Screen.
• Open the PDF, then swipe down with two fingers.

How do you read a PDF aloud on Android?

Turn on Select to Speak in Settings, Accessibility, then open the PDF, tap the accessibility button or swipe up with two fingers, and tap the text to hear, or Play for the whole screen. The name and location vary with the phone's brand: search the settings for “speak” if you can't find it.

Reading follows the screen, not the document: you scroll and restart on each page, and the voice depends on the speech engine installed on the phone. Google's Reading mode app is built for web pages and, according to Google's help, doesn't support PDFs.

• Settings, Accessibility, Select to Speak.
• Turn on the shortcut.
• Open the PDF, start the feature, tap the text.

How do you read a PDF aloud on Mac?

Turn on Speak selection in System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, select the PDF text in Preview, then press Option-Esc; the same shortcut stops it. The speech controller lets you change the rate, skip back or forward and pause.

According to Apple's help, with nothing selected the Mac reads the text available in the active window. It follows the order of the text in the file, which isn't always the reading order: on a two-column paper, sentences can get mixed up.

• System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak.
• Turn on Speak selection.
• Select the text in Preview, then Option-Esc.

How do you read a PDF aloud on a Chromebook?

Turn on Select-to-speak in Settings, Accessibility, Text-to-Speech, then hold the Search (or Launcher) key and drag the pointer over the PDF text, or highlight it and press Search + S. The Chromebook reads the passage and highlights each word; Ctrl stops it.

Chrome's reading mode (Alt + Shift + R) reads web pages well, but Google's help doesn't present it for PDFs. ChromeVox, the full screen reader, also announces menus and buttons: it is meant for blind and low-vision users rather than a student listening to notes.

• Settings, Accessibility, Text-to-Speech.
• Turn on Select-to-speak.
• Hold Search and drag over the text, or press Search + S.

What about a Windows PC?

The simplest way is to open the PDF in Microsoft Edge, already installed, then press Ctrl+Shift+U or right-click and choose Read aloud: Edge reads the document and highlights the text, with several online voices. Narrator (Windows logo key + Ctrl + Enter) reads PDFs too, but it is a full screen reader that announces buttons and menus.

The full walkthrough, with Narrator and its natural voices, is on our page read a PDF aloud on Windows, and Edge's settings on Microsoft Edge read aloud.

What about Acrobat Reader?

Open the PDF in Acrobat Reader, find Read Out Loud in the View menu and turn it on, then have the current page or the whole document read. The voice is your system's, and the exact menu name can vary between versions.

The feature has to be turned on again for each document; its settings and common problems are on our page about Acrobat Reader's Read Out Loud.

What does an online reader like Readotte add?

It reads the document, not the screen. Readotte extracts the PDF text, leaves out repeated headers and footers, page numbers, small-print notes and captions and citation marks like [12], then reads headings and list items as sentences of their own, with a pause. PDFs exported from Word or Google Docs, where each word is stored separately, are pieced back into sentences.

While you listen, the sentence and the word being spoken are highlighted; tap a sentence to jump to it, or use Space and the arrow keys. Each document remembers the sentence where you stopped, and there's nothing to install: it works in Safari on iPhone, Chrome on Android and Chromebook, Safari or Chrome on Mac, and Edge, Chrome or Firefox on a PC.

• No scanned PDFs yet: without a text layer, Readotte tells you instead of reading a blank page.
• Tables and formulas: read as text, cell after cell, rarely pleasant to listen to.
• English and French only; MP3 download requires Readotte Plus (€3.99 a month).

Which method should you use on your device?

For a page, a letter or a passage to check, your device's feature is enough: it is free, unlimited and knows far more languages than Readotte.

For a thesis, a report or course notes you listen to in several sittings, a reader that follows the document's structure and resumes at the right sentence is more comfortable. The table sums up what each method does.

Why won't a PDF read on any device?

Almost always because it is scanned: each page is an image, with no text. Try to select a word; if you can't, no read-aloud tool can read it without character recognition (OCR).

The other causes, protected PDFs, words read one by one, text out of order, are explained in our guide why won't my PDF read aloud.