About this project
This tool reads snooker scores aloud for blind and visually impaired viewers, so they can follow live matches on television without needing to see the on-screen scoreboard.
The idea came from a request on the Snooker Scene Podcast, presented by Dave Hendon, where a blind listener asked for commentators to call the score more often. This is a small, non-commercial answer to that — built using the open data feed from snooker.org, with the kind permission of its creator Hermund Ardalen.
Press Start at the top of the home page and the page will read out frame scores as they change, with a regular summary every couple of minutes. Use the settings on the home page to control how often scores are read and which matches to follow.
For World Championship semifinals and the final, the page announces additional detail when each frame ends — the frame number, the points scored by each player, and any breaks of 50 or higher with player attribution. For example: "Mark Selby took frame 16 with a maximum 147."
Note: the scoreboard updates frame-by-frame, not point-by-point within a frame. For the live action during a frame, the TV or radio commentary fills the gap.
Tips for using the tool
Keep this tab open in the background. Your browser must remain open for speech to work, and on mobile the screen may need to stay on.
Use the Read scores aloud every setting to control how often you get a regular spoken summary, even when scores haven't changed. The default is every 2 minutes.
Tick the World Championship only option to limit announcements to matches at the Crucible. Untick to follow other tournaments too.
Found a bug or got a suggestion? Use the contact form.
Service status
A scheduled job on the server fetches new data from snooker.org once a minute. The boxes below show the most recent successful refresh. In normal operation, data age stays under 90 seconds.
Credits
Data: All match data is provided by snooker.org, maintained by Hermund Ardalen. This tool would not exist without his generosity in providing API access.
Hosting: The page and data proxy run on Cloudflare Workers, with a scheduled cron trigger refreshing the data each minute.
Speech: Browser-native Web Speech API — no third-party voice service involved. Announcements also go to an ARIA live region so they're read by screen readers if the synthesised voice is muted.