Hi all.
I stumbled across something interesting in the last couple of days,
and I don't *think* it's been mentioned here, but feel free to hit me
with a dead trout if I'm repeating old knowledge.
I know that I'm not the only one who sometimes uses the "speak
selected text" option that you can set from the speech preference
pane. It can be really useful in some circumstances, particularly web
pages and for me, reading large chunks of text.
So anyway, what I've been doing is going into speech, selecting the
"speak selected text" option and giving it a hotkey. What this seems
to do is, copy the text onto the clipboard and then speak the
clipboard text.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, if you don't have
some kind of clipboard history thing, it wipes out whatever you might
have on the clipboard. And second, particularly on slower computers
like this beast of an Ibook I'm still using, it doesn't always work.
The word "copy" often gets spoken by VO, and interupts the speech
you're actually trying to listen to.
What I discovered is, we might be better off ignoring that option
altogether and assigning a hotkey to the "Start Speaking Text" option
in the services menu.
I guess I always assumed they were the same thing, but they're not.
For a start, this option *doesn't* copy anything to the clipboard. As
a result, it seems to be a *lot* quicker to start speaking, and for
some reason, I haven't had VO override what I'm trying to read once in
the couple of days I've been trying this. As a result of which, I'm
finding I'm able to continuously read web pages that I previously had
to paste into a text editor window to read.
If anyone else wants to give it a shot, Go into the keyboard and mouse
preference pane and select the keyboard shortcuts tab.
Go past the table and click the button next to it. For the menu title,
enter "Start Speaking Text" without the quotes, but make sure the
capitalisation is correct, or OS X won't recognize the menu option.
Make sure it's avalable in all applications and give it a keystroke
that won't clobber anything else.
That's all there should be to it. I'd suggest giving it a different
shortcut to the one you gave the speak selected text command in the
speech prefs pane and keep both around for a while if you're
experimenting with this, but your milage may vary.
Again, this is not Voiceover. This uses the default system voice you
set in the speech prefs pane, with the rate and pitch you set for it
there.
I don't know if anyone else will find this useful, and I don't know
for *sure* if the keyboard shortcut method I mentioned will work in
Tiger. I don't have a Tiger system to test this on anymore, but I
thought I'd just throw it out there.
- interesting discovery about reading highlighted text yvonne thomson
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