Making a tkinter window acessible to Windows narrator

Question

I was wondering if i could output something that the windows narrator can use to narrate my tkiner application.

import tkinter as tk
 
# create root window
root = tk.Tk()

root.title("Test")

 
lbl = tk.Label(root, text = "A label")
lbl.grid()
 
root.mainloop()

Taking this as a example, lets say a mouse is hovering over the label, the narraor will read, "A label".

There are methods for doing optical text recognition through pip libraries, but I was wondering if I could do ocr without downloading modules, and through the use of windows narrator.

Answer 1

You can use the pywin32 package, with SAPI SpVoice.

I have bound the <Enter> attribute to speak whenever you hover over the label. You could of course use different triggers if you so desire.

import tkinter as tk
import win32com.client

# create root window
root = tk.Tk()

root.title("Test")

lbl = tk.Label(root, text="A label")
lbl.grid()

speaker = win32com.client.Dispatch("SAPI.SpVoice")

lbl.bind("<Enter>", lambda _: speaker.Speak(lbl.cget("text")))

root.mainloop()

If you want to generalise this solution such that all your labels are narrated, you could subclass the tk.Label, like so

import tkinter as tk
import win32com.client

speaker = win32com.client.Dispatch("SAPI.SpVoice")


class NarratedLabel(tk.Label):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.bind("<Enter>", lambda _: speaker.Speak(self.cget("text")))


# create root window
root = tk.Tk()

root.title("Test")


lbl = NarratedLabel(root, text="A label")
lbl.grid()

lbl2 = NarratedLabel(root, text="Another label")
lbl2.grid()

root.mainloop()