How to Listen to Congress.gov Pages

Congress.gov allows some content to be read out loud to you. This is useful if you have trouble reading text online, reading on a device with a small screen, or simply want to listen to text while doing other things. You can also download the text as an MP3 file for later use. The Listen feature is currently enabled for bills that have at least one bill summary, bill texts, the Congressional Record, committee reports, committee prints, committee hearing transcripts, and help center pages.

How does it work?

Listen to a bill summary, bill text, the Congressional Record, a committee report, a committee print, a committee hearing transcript, or a help center page.

Click the Listen button:

An audio player appears and it starts reading the text of the webpage out loud.

In the player you can:

• Click the menu icon to adjust settings and features
• Pause/restart the reading
• Stop the reading
• Skip backward and forward 5 seconds to navigate the audio
• Adjust the volume
• Adjust the reading speed
• Click the download icon to download the audio file
• Close the player

You can use tab/shift+tab to navigate inside the player and press enter to activate a certain button or link.

Listen to selected text

You can select a part of the text that you want to listen to and then press the pop-up Listen button that appears next to the mouse pointer. When you click the pop-up Listen button, an audio player appears and the player starts reading the text you have selected. To select text, move your mouse over it while holding down the left mouse button.

Menu

Click the menu icon to access:

• Settings
• Click and Listen
• Enlarge Text
• Text Mode
• Page Mask
• Download mp3
• Help

Help

Click the menu icon, and click Help for complete descriptions of all ReadSpeaker features.