Roku Remote Star Button: Hidden Features You Need
Four quick presses activate a text-to-speech screen reader across most current Roku hardware.
The star button on a Roku remote opens hidden menus, toggles accessibility tools and controls playback settings that most users never find. Pressing it does one thing on the home screen, something else during video playback, and acts as a hardware shortcut for visually impaired viewers. For the millions of households using Roku streaming devices, this single key replaces multiple buried settings menus.
Roku controls roughly half of the U.S. connected TV market, according to industry estimates, yet its physical remote has remained largely unchanged for years. The star button functions as a context-sensitive options key. Its output shifts depending on what the device is doing at the exact moment of the press. The same button behaves differently through the Roku mobile app.
On the Roku home screen, highlighting an app in the Quick Access section and pressing the star button yields a single choice: removing that shortcut from the row. Highlighting a channel in the full apps list pulls up deeper system data. Users can view the app’s version and build number, rearrange its position on the grid, uninstall it, rate it or force a manual check for app updates. On a Roku TV, highlighting an external input like a video game console triggers a prompt to rename the source.
During active video playback, the star button opens a sidebar overlay. This menu handles closed captioning, sleep timers, volume mode adjustments and picture quality tweaks. The exact parameters depend on the specific streaming app running at the time. A Roku TV exposes more display-level controls in this sidebar than a standalone Roku streaming box.
Pressing the star button four times consecutively activates a text-to-speech screen reader, a feature Roku previously called Audio Guide. This accessibility shortcut works only in the United States. It bypasses the standard settings navigation entirely. Fine-tuning the speech rate or audio volume still requires entering the Accessibility category within the main Settings page.
According to Roku, the screen reader toggle via the star button is supported on the following hardware: Roku TV, Roku Streambar and Streambar Pro, Roku Smart Soundbar, Roku Express and Express+, Roku Express 4K and 4K+, Roku Streaming Stick and Streaming Stick+, Roku Streaming Stick 4K and 4K+, Roku Premiere and Premiere+, and Roku Ultra and Ultra LT.
