Hearpost

Hearpost adds a floating text-to-speech widget to your posts and pages, using the browser’s built-in Web Speech API ( SpeechSynthesisUtterance ). Nothing is sent to any external server — the entire reading happens locally in the visitor’s browser.

Features

• Floating widget — collapses to a small icon; click to expand into the full player

• Play / Pause toggle, with a Speed slider (0.5x–2x)

• Voice selector — automatically shown only when the visitor’s browser actually offers more than one voice; hidden entirely otherwise

• Six position presets — Top Left, Top Right, Middle Left, Middle Right, Bottom Left, Bottom Right

• Customizable icon color via a native WordPress color picker

• Customizable widget title, also shown as a hover tooltip on the collapsed icon

• [hearpost_reader] shortcode for manual placement, if you’d rather not auto-insert it everywhere

• Reset to Defaults button to wipe customizations and start over

• Fully self-contained icon (inline SVG) — no external requests, not even to WordPress’s own emoji CDN

Notes & Limitations

• Voice availability is entirely browser/OS-dependent. Desktop Chrome tends to offer several voices; some mobile browsers offer only one (or none) — in the latter case, the Voice dropdown is automatically hidden.

• Changing speed or voice mid-playback resumes from roughly the last spoken word (tracked via the browser’s boundary events) rather than restarting from the top — but this depends on the browser/voice actually firing those events. When it isn’t supported, it falls back to restarting from the beginning.

• Closing the widget (×) does not pause or stop playback — it keeps reading in the background, the same way a minimized media player would. Reopening the panel reflects the correct Play/Pause state.

• Some browsers’ built-in voices (e.g. certain Chrome “network” voices) stream over the internet in the background as an inherent part of how the browser implements them — this is outside the plugin’s control either way.