Oh my, you've hit on a very sore point, and how I do agree! The Windows Secrets Newsletter is just such a case in point. I've unsubscribed to it just because of that very complaint-I just can't tollerate it! Could such a solution as yours really be implemented? I, for one, would truly love it. At times I've suspected that people included as many long long links just to show how geeky-techie they could look; most of the time it's just laziness. If they are really all that necessary, why not gather them together at the end of an article, like footnotes, where they could be treated like the non-essential verbiage they are-referred to if needed, or ignored/skipped. I've not been impressed!
Louis Gosselin From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 8:12 PM To: WE English mailing list Subject: LINKS & Read-to-end How do you listers, feel about this: Sometimes, when reading a mail, or when choosing the CTRL-SHIFT-R, in a webpage - you come across some links, that don't have a real name tag. Some of them are as much as 120 characters long, and the mix of letters, numbers and other 'funny' characters, make you wonder if this is meant as a test of the speech synthesizer's capabilities. Or, do the webmasters out there, in some moments of their construction work, introduce a competition, just to see, who would come up with the most tricky link? :) Ok, so sometimes, the seech will take a ton of time, simply to get through ONE link. And what do you do, when there is several of them, just on one page? I have had times, when the Read-To-End facility, simply has been useless, because you ain't able to get the main points, out of the text, simply because there is too much 'trash' being read aloud, from all the links. Yes, it would have been wonderful, if the webmasters would have tagged their links, buttons, etc, with real (comprehendable) text. But, I doubt, wwe will ever get there. I have been thinking, of a good way to solve htis problem. Here is the best suggestion, I can come up with. It even could have been implemented as a checkbox, in one of the menus, in WE; just in case, some users find it fun/helpful, to listen to the speech going heywire, when it meets up with one of these 'mile-long' weblinks. Could we have the speech, only read the first part of the link? The MAIN PART - so to speak? Say a link like http://payments.ebay.co.uk/?viewitem <http://payments.ebay.co.uk/?viewitem&123098753466/crims-crams/gohome/sleep/well .html> &123098753466/crims-crams/gohome/sleep/well.html Simply would have been read as: 'link payments.ebay.co.uk' Shouldn't be hard to do the trick here, even by a script. What the speech would do, is to skip the introducing http://, and then read, whaever is from there, until the first /. Maybe, the feature, even could let the user define, how many 'parts' of a link, he wanted to have read - that is, how many / the system would include. So, in the example above, if the user sets 1 slash, as the length of the spoken text, it would be like shown above. If the user sets the number of parts to be 2, he would have the domain, and the number, of the above example, read out loud. In the case, where a link has no slashes, most truely it has a 'real' tag, and the whole text can be read aloud. Anyone have some feelings about this? If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
