I am trying to use the text to speech feature for a few days until I get my new glasses. I went to Accessibility and clicked on Speech and then Speak Selected Text. I selected the text I wanted read out loud and pressed the option + Esp key as noted by default. Nothing happened. I need to know what I did wrong or neglected to do to make this work. I've used it in the past, but today I can't seem to do it.

My most frequent failure is because I have the output volume too low.

Nope. Volume fine. I looked at the custom voices and now it's downloading different voices. I can't make it stop even after force quit. I went into the accessibility again and speech and it's still downloading. Someone online said something about stoping it with activity monitor, but I really couldn't see how to do that except that they said to go to Network and then separate by bytes or something of that nature. This is really aggravating.

Downloading a voice should take no more than a minute or two. They are typically around 1.5 Kilobytes in size.

Activity Monitor can be used to shut down virtually any task, but the trick is in knowing what task to shut down. Unfortunately, I have no clue what the text to speech task is called.

I wish it was a minute or two. They all were over 25 minutes! It's crazy. I looked at the activity monitor and didn't see anything like speech. I still don't know why it's not working for me. Of course, FaceTime doesn't work either so maybe they both went by the wayside.

In System Preferences > Sound, check the Input and Output settings to be sure the correct devices are selected and check their volume settings.

In Sound, the devices shown are my Logitech speaker and my internal speakers. My speakers are working fine for everything else, but no sound when trying to use Text to Speech. I tried both speakers and no difference. There is something else screwing it up, and I don't know how to tell what it is. Thanks, Joe.