Listen to the news instead of reading it

Local news assumes you can sit down and read. Not everyone can, and not everyone wants to. Some readers have lost enough sight that a screenful of text is work rather than information. Some find that long articles tire their eyes in a way they did not ten years ago. Some are cooking, driving, walking the dog or minding a grandchild, and would happily take the news through their ears if anyone offered it.

So every article here can be read aloud, free, without an account and without a limit.

How to use it

Open any story. Near the top, beside the date, there is a button marked Listen. Press it and the article starts reading from the headline.

• The same button pauses. Press it once more and it continues from where you stopped, not from the beginning.
• The word being spoken is highlighted while it is spoken, and the page scrolls to keep it in view, so you can follow along or simply listen.
• It works on a phone, a tablet and a computer, in any modern browser. Nothing to download, nothing to sign up for.
• The first press takes a few seconds while the recording is made. After that it starts straight away, for you and for everyone else.

Who it is for

Readers with reduced sight

Sight loss is not all-or-nothing. Far more people have some useful vision than have none, and for many of them reading a long article is possible but tiring. Listening removes the effort without removing the article: it is the full piece, in order, not a summary.

If you already use a screen reader

Keep using it. VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS and TalkBack read the whole site, not one article, and they do it at the speed and in the voice you have already chosen — which is almost always better than anything a website can offer you. We build the pages with real headings, landmarks and labelled controls so your screen reader has proper structure to move through.

The Listen button is a different thing, for a different moment: a recording of one story, played out loud, that anyone in the room can hear. If your screen reader is what you want, you will not need it, and that is fine.

Older readers

Small type and long paragraphs put people off the news long before they would ever call it an accessibility problem. If you have found yourself skipping articles because reading them felt like effort, this is the button for you. It requires no setting up, no help from a relative and no change to how you use anything else.

Readers with dyslexia

Hearing the words while seeing them highlighted is a well-established way to read more comfortably. The highlighting follows the voice word by word, so your place is kept for you.

Anyone with their hands full

Commuting, cooking, driving, walking, at the gym. The audio is a plain recording, so your phone's own controls, your headphone buttons and your car stereo all work with it as they would for music.

What the voice is, honestly

It is a synthetic voice, not a journalist at a microphone. We think that is worth stating plainly on the page rather than leaving you to work it out: it is a British English voice running on our own servers, and it reads the article exactly as published.

• Nothing is summarised or shortened for audio. You hear the same article a reader reads.
• It reads the headline, the standfirst and the body in order.
• Every recording is marked as spoken by a synthetic voice, both on the page and in the data search engines read.
• A synthetic voice still misreads the occasional name or abbreviation. If you hear one, tell us and we will fix how it is read.

The whole day, in one go

If you would rather not open stories one at a time, News London also records a daily bulletin covering the previous day and a weekly review of the main events. Same voice, written to be listened to rather than read. You can play them on the podcast page or subscribe in any podcast app.

What it costs you

Nothing. No account, no subscription, no limit on how much you listen to, and no advertising inside the audio. We built it because a local paper that only works for people who can comfortably read a screen is not serving its whole patch.

If something does not work

Tell us and we will fix it. Say which article, which device and what happened — no technical detail needed. Accessibility problems go to the top of the list, ahead of new features. Write to editor@newslondon.uk.

Note: reading aloud is temporarily unavailable on this site while we work on it. The podcast bulletins are unaffected.