Two ways to listen
On bc1.nl and bc1.eu you can have the text read out loud. There are two ways to do that, and they do different things: have a whole article read to you, or point at what you want to hear.
Having a whole article read aloud
Every article has a Read aloud button at the top. Click it and the reading starts at the title. The words being spoken light up in the text, so you can follow where the voice is.
While it reads, a bar appears at the bottom of the screen. It holds the same button, now saying Stop, two arrows to jump a piece back or forward, and a counter showing where you are. A long article easily runs to forty pieces.
There is deliberately no pause button. Pausing and resuming turned out to be unreliable in every browser: sometimes the sound never came back, sometimes reading would not start again at all. Better three buttons that always do what they promise than four with one that falters. Stopping and starting again does work, every time.
Point to hear
The menu bar holds a button marked Voice. Switch it on and anything you hover over is spoken: a link, a menu item, a heading, a paragraph, a list item, a caption, a table cell. Hover a photo and you hear its description. No clicking needed, moving is enough.
That way you can explore the site without having to read anything first. The button stays on until you switch it off yourself, even when you move to another page. When the two ways meet, reading aloud takes precedence: while an article is being read, pointing stays quiet and picks up again afterwards.
Point to hear is not a standard browser feature and has no common name. We thought it up and built it ourselves, because reading aloud asks for a choice not everyone can make: you have to know what is there before you can decide whether you want to hear it. Pointing turns that around.
Where does that voice come from?
Not from us. BC1® has not recorded a voice of its own and has not bought a speaking service, and there are no audio files on the server. The reading is done by your own browser, using the voices already on your computer or phone.
That has three consequences you notice. The text never leaves your device: nothing is sent to an outside party to be spoken, and so we do not know that you use it. It sounds different for everyone, because an iPhone carries different voices than a Windows computer. And nothing can go out of date: if we change an article, the voice reads the new text straight away.
Most devices carry several voices, and they differ widely in quality. So the site does not take the first one it finds, but looks for the best one present, in the language of the page.
- iPhone, iPad and Mac: Apple's Enhanced and Siri voices, usually the most natural there are.
- Windows with Edge: the new neural voices, hard to tell from a person.
- Windows with Chrome: only the older voices of Windows itself, which sound like 2005.
- Android: Google's voices, usually more than good enough.
The bar shows the name of the voice currently reading, and whether it runs on your device or over the internet.
When something goes wrong
It sounds tinny. You are probably using Chrome on Windows, which only sees the older voices. Try opening the page in Edge: same text, a far more natural voice.
I hear nothing. If you use Firefox on Windows, reading aloud does not work. Firefox only sees an older generation of voices there, not the ones from Windows 11. On a Mac, iPhone or iPad Firefox works fine.
It reads with an accent from another language. Then there is no voice in this language on your device and the browser falls back on its default. Which voices are on it is up to your device and not to this site: we cannot add one and cannot pick one for you. The makers themselves explain how to manage voices: Windows, iPhone, iPad and Mac or Android.
This feature exists for people who find reading difficult. If read aloud does not work on your device, it is down to the browser or to the voices installed on it; each case above says what you can try.