Selectable: OCR & Text Capture

The core job is simple to describe and hard to do well. Press ⌘+⇧+2, drag a box over any text on screen, and Selectable recognizes it and drops it on your clipboard. It works across apps, so you don't need the source program to support selection. Web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, images, presentations, screencasts and video tutorials are all fair game. If you can see the words, the app can read them.

Selectable runs its optical character recognition through Apple's Vision framework. There's no third-party OCR dependency and no upload step. That keeps the whole pipeline offline, which is why it still works on a plane or in a meeting room with flaky Wi-Fi. Translation is the one exception: that needs an internet connection, and only on macOS 26 or later.

On macOS 26 and newer, Selectable translates captured text into your language the moment you copy it. You grab a line from a foreign-language article or a menu photo, and the translated version appears without you switching apps. It's the kind of thing that quietly removes a step you didn't realize was slowing you down.

Any captured text can be read aloud in natural voices across multiple languages, which is handy for proofreading, for listening to a dense paragraph while your eyes are busy, or for checking how a word in another language actually sounds. The Listen option sits right next to the capture action, so you don't have to route the text through a separate reader.

Selectable lets you tidy the captured text before it lands. You can preserve line breaks, strip empty lines, or mask sensitive data so account numbers and names don't travel with the rest of the paste. For anyone who screenshots dashboards or invoices, the masking option is a small feature with a very big practical payoff.

Capture is triggered from any app through global keyboard shortcuts, or from the menu bar. There's no need to switch to Selectable first or keep a window open. It's a menu bar app in the truest sense: invisible until you need it, then gone again.

There's no subscription, which is rarer than it should be in this category. Pay once, keep the updates. The App Store tier adds iCloud sync and works across all your Macs, while the website tiers are tied to a fixed number of machines.