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I’ve been working on a plugin that speaks content segments of a post or a page.

The plugin, ListenUp, provides four shortcodes:

1. ListenUp will speak the text content enclosed between its opening and closing tags when that content is clicked.
2. ListenUpExcerpt will provide a link that when clicked will fetch and speak the post excerpt.
3. ListenUpImage will provide a link that when clicked will fetch and speak the description of an image.
4. ListenUpCustom will provide a link that when clicked will speak the contents of a custom field.

This post provides examples of its use. I’ve published it so that my beta-testers, friends and others can see (and hear) it in operation before installing it on their WordPress websites. Eventually, I’ll add a story of how I developed the idea and put it into code.

Each instance below shows how the plugin is employed in the editor followed by the presentation. Clicking on the presentation will initiate speaking; clicking again will cancel speaking.

The last two examples show how to grab and speak arbitrary sections of speech stored as custom fields. This allows you to have spoken text without having that text appear in the post content.

Please note that this is experimental software. Browser support for voice synthesis is not universal and may not work in older versions.

Send me an email if you’re interested in testing out ListenUp.

To experiment further with spoken text, check out my Voice Synthesis Playground. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

RELATED READING

Adding Voice to WordPress. Parts of my presentation on ListenUp that I’ve made to various meetups and usergroups.

Understanding HTML5 Audio. Although I wrote this post 10 years ago, it’s still a useful guide to implementing recorded sounds in a webpage.

Tags: JavaScript, Voice Synthesis, wordpress