No TTS in Reader mode in Firefox

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1

Normally in Firefox on Windows and other Linux distros there is a “narrate” button that will read articles aloud when you put a page in reader mode.

However on NixOS that button seems to be missing:
image

I’ve tried installing the espeak and speechd packages as I saw in threads with similar problems for other distros but that did not resolve it. I also verified the usual suspects in about:config.

Does anyone have narrator working in Firefox on NixOS?

2

That requires Firefox to be able to dlopen libspeechd.so. Since NixOS intentionally does not have that, you will need to manually add it LD_LIBRARY_PATH, see Firefox missing Narrate feature · Issue #78880 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.

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3

Thanks for pointing me towards that thread good to know people are looking into it.

Unfortunately it looks like manually adding LD_LIBRARY_PATH does not work anymore. I wasn’t able to get narrate working with that incantation.

4

Hello. Its me from the future. The PR fixing this is merged and narrate is working now on unstable! You just need to enable with:

nixpkgs.config.firefox.speechSynthesisSupport = true
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5

how do I enable this for a firejail-wrapped version of firefox?

6

With nixpkgs.config.firefox.speechSynthesisSupport = true, my firejailed firefox has this error:

Error: Can’t connect to unix socket /run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/speechd.sock: Connection refused. Autospawn: Server successfully autospawned