Text to Speech

Hearing your writing is the best proofreading trick there is

Reading your own prose silently is unreliable, because you do not actually read it — you recognise it. Your brain, knowing what you meant, helpfully supplies missing words, repairs broken grammar and skims straight past the typo you have looked at forty times. Hearing it read aloud by a voice that has no idea what you intended defeats that entirely. Sentences that run on become audibly breathless. Clumsy rhythm and accidental repetition become obvious. Missing words leave gaps you cannot fail to hear. It is the single most effective proofreading technique available to a solo writer, and it works precisely because the speech engine is stupid — it reads what is actually on the page rather than what you meant to put there.

Accessibility is the real reason this exists

Text to speech is a convenience for most people and a necessity for many. Screen readers are how blind and severely visually impaired users navigate computers at all. People with dyslexia frequently comprehend spoken text far more easily than written, and reading alongside audio measurably improves both speed and retention. Users with motor impairments, with attention differences, or recovering from injury all rely on it. And a great many people simply absorb information better by ear. This is why speech synthesis is built into every modern operating system rather than being a specialist add-on — and it is worth remembering when you write anything for the web, because content that reads well aloud is content that works for far more people.