VoiceOver to read text/content...how?

I think you misunderstand what VoiceOver does. All it is intended to be is a mechanism for speaking whatever appears on the screen. It is not intended as a text-to-speech translator. There are specialized applications for that purpose which you can find at VersionTracker or MacUpdate. For example:

GhostReader
iSpeak

As for turning it on or off with COMMAND-F5 it works here although there is initially a slight delay until the software is loaded. You can check Keyboard preferences to be sure you have not checked the box to change how the function keys work.

Actually, VoiceOver worked pretty well—and in many ways superior to Speak Text—under Leopard for reading documents out loud. With VoiceOver in Leopard, you were able to change pronunciations to words and even phrases to get them to pronounce correctly. Under Snow Leopard, I can't get VoiceOver to work with pronouncing certain phrases correctly; it only works on a word-by-word basis. There are times when it is necessary to put a phrase in context so VoiceOver would know whether to read a heteronym such as "read," as either "red" or "reed." That worked easily and well in Leopard. I can't make that work in Snow Leopard.

Also in Leopard, you could select all text—even long passages—and the entire piece would be read (red) back. In Snow Leopard, it will inexplicably squeak and stop reading until you mark the text again, at which point it will read another paragraph or two and stop. I'm sure there is way around this, but VoiceOver in Leopard required no learning curve. It was easy to use.

VoiceOver in Leopard was an easy, streamlined way to get text-to-speech. VoiceOver in Snow Leopard is not and makes me believe that this is not its intended use.

In the apple system preferences there is a option for speech. There you can designate a key combination to activate "Text to speech". This will allow for your mac to read any highlighted text from most applications. Voice over and Universal access is more for navigation of the computer for users with impairment.

Yep, I've been using Text to Speech for years. But it doesn't always pronounce words correctly, which is why I had been using VoiceOver in Leopard, since you could tweak pronunciations of not only single words, but multi-word phrases. VoiceOver worked and was very easy to use under Leopard, but became difficult in Snow Leopard. I'm back to using Text to Speech and putting up with Alex saying words and names incorrectly...