Hi Yvonne, Thanks for this suggestion about using "Start Speaking Selected Text" and binding it to a keyboard shortcut. This is an interesting way to get large chunks of text read out -- including web pages.
YT: >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. The services menu options don't appear to use copy at all. I'd guess that they are doing some sort of pipe or redirect. There's a discussion in the archives from last year with Dane about using the services menu to send selected text to TextEdit. Because you're not using copy, this action doesn't involved the clipboard at all, and is also not likely to be subject to maximum buffer lengths. (I think this issue of using "copy" is also related to Jacob's recent comments on limits in recording text books with Alex.) YT: >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. This suggestion does work under Tiger, although I may need to explore different shortcuts keys -- at present, even though I used a combination that wasn't in VoiceOver, and which I thought was not used in other apps, I have to turn off VoiceOver, use the shortcut, and then turn VoiceOver back on. However, there is one difficulty that I can see with using "Speak Selected Text" in place of VoiceOver for these functions -- you can't interrupt the speech. This is a quite standard I/O issue where you can't get control back until the command completes. So if I select text on a web page or in TextEdit and start speaking with the services menu, I can't stop this voice until it finishes (the way VoiceOver can be stopped with the control key). Of course, this is true using this with the Services menu option to "Start Speaking Text" in any case. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll explore some more. I also have to restart my machine to have the shortcut take effect in all apps. And I think that I also need to restart my computer to have the change take effect if I delete the keyboard shortcut. (In order to do this I need to navigate to the "outline" on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse menu of System Preferences), interact, VO-keys+down arrow to the "Application Keyboard Shortcuts" folder, expand the folder with VO-keys+backslash, VO-keys+down arrow to the "All Applications" folder, expand it with VO-keys+backslash and VO-keys+down arrow to "Start Speaking Text" and its shortcut sequence. Then I had to tab to the "-" button beyond the "+" button and VO-keys+spacebar to remove the shortcut. This still isn't removed until I restart my machine. Hope this helps others. Cheers, Esther
