Text to Speech for Notebook Cells

[psychemedia]

An early accessibility extension for Jupyter notebooks, jameslmartin/jupyter-a11y, provided text-to-speech support that could read out the contents of markdown cells, or, code cells a line at a time.

Text-to-speech is provided in the browser using the Web Speech API. For example, in a code cell, run:

%%javascript
speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("Text to speech via the Javascript speechSynthesis API."))

Given there is voice support in the toolbar, it would also be useful to have an speech synthesis UI available that can exploit the notebook's structure and semantics rather more directly, and powerfully, than expecting a screen reader to parse the HTML?