Besides the VoiceOver facility itself, if you simply highlight a piece of text, then go to the Services menu—>Speech—>Start speaking text, the Mac will read it to you in the default system voice set in the Speech panel of System Preferences. You can stop it again using the next menu item, Services—>Speech—>Stop speaking text.
Using the Speech control panel, you can also set a keyboard shortcut to speak any highlighted text, which is very useful too.
However, a new software package,
VisioVoice, does an excellent job of turning a text file into sound and reading it to you almost like a tape recorder. You can pause, restart, rewind, skip forward or back, all in the very high quality voices from
Acapela Group. VisioVoice runs in the background too, so that you can listen to a text file while working on something else, and has a superb text zoom facility that follows on with the voice.
HTH
Archie
iBook G4 12" 1.2 GHz, G4 Sawtooth 400 MHz, PowerBook G4 17" 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.7) 
