Simple: The Computer Tells You The Time
It's easy for anybody to loose track of time when they're using a computer, and if you have a neurological or attention problem then you may get even more lost than most. Here's how to get your computer to regularly announce the time:
Open System Preferences - it's the fourth item in the Apple menu (the shape) in the very top left corner of the screen as shown here:
In the "System" section, usually about the fourth line of icons in System Preferences, there is an icon labeled "Date & Time" which looks like a clock face with a small calendar in front of it. Click on this Date & Time icon.
The Date & Time pane has sections labeled "Date & Time", "Time Zone", and "Clock". Click on the "Clock" section and you'll see the options for the date and time display in the menu bar, and the other one "Announce the time" as this image shows:
You need to select the checkbox for "Announce the time" as in the image, then select the frequency of announcements in the selection box. If you like, select the "Customize voice..." button to select which voice the time announcement uses, and the speed and volume of the announcements.
- Ricky Buchanan
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2 Responses to Simple: The Computer Tells You The Time
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[...] quality. Apple’s voices are OK to listen to for short passages like getting your computer to speak the time, but if you use text-to-speech very much you’ll probably want to purchase a higher quality [...]
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[...] or any of the other things built into Mac OS X that let you select a voice to use – such as announcing the time. This is something that is being worked on by several people though, so look forward to eSpeak [...]
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[...] last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter [...]
Can you suggest how I can prevent this time announcement from turning off? Over the past couple of weeks I have had to reopen the preferences, observe that nothing appears to have been changed, close the preferences and the announcements begin again. I have now tried clicking the lock to see if that will prevent the turning off.
It shouldn't turn itself off - did the padlocking work? If not, you'll have to figure out which plist file is the right one and delete that probably - I suggest you ask on the Apple Discussion forums about it. I don't know offhand, and it's not really an accessibility problem. Best of luck.
[...] quality. Apple’s voices are OK to listen to for short passages like getting your computer to speak the time, but if you use text-to-speech very much you’ll probably want to purchase a higher quality [...]
[...] or any of the other things built into Mac OS X that let you select a voice to use – such as announcing the time. This is something that is being worked on by several people though, so look forward to eSpeak [...]
[...] last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter [...]