Reading speed resetting to default (possibly solved)

[Bruce]

Hi folks, Jim

Problem:

TextAloud version 3.x reading speed reverting to default while reading.

Solution (at least one):

ASCII character 187, "right double angle quotes", causes this behavior. Filtering that character in "Character speaking and filtering" appears to mitigate.

Background:

Since the first betas of version 3 I've been having a problem with TextAloud suddenly switching to the default speed from whatever faster speed I had set. Try as I might I could not seem to reliably replicate the problem, thinking that it was some combination of my speech recognition software, TextAloud, hardware or whatever. Jim made great efforts to help me with the problem but without some decent clue he didn't have much to work with. Also, my hardware and my speech recognition software were both pretty old. We agreed to leave it until I got new stuff. I have new stuff.

So, for anyone affected, this should help.

Jim, if this is an easily fixable bug you may wish to put on your list of things to do. Or you may have some other suggestion. In any case, thanks for all your efforts. I do still have that little speed problem which I will address separately.

Bruce

[Jim Bretti]

That is really an odd one. Just curious ... can you let me know which voice(s) you're seeing the problem with?

[SFCurley]

I have seen similar problems previously, and have an entry or two in my dictionaries to catch such occurrences, one of which was the left angle character. I'll add the right angle to my list as well.

[Jim Bretti]

By left angle character are you referring to « (ascii 171) ?

[SFCurley]

Yes. That's the one.

[Bruce]

That is really an odd one. Just curious ... can you let me know which voice(s) you're seeing the problem with?

NeoSpeech Kate and Paul.

I had this problem under Windows XP and NaturallySpeaking 8. I'm now on Windows 7 64-bit with NaturallySpeaking 11. So, clean install of everything.

Jim, you Tried to help me with this last year. I couldn't figure out any connection at the time and we agreed to just leave it until, as I said in my post, I got new hardware and software. I was hoping it was just some combination of those. However, it does appear to be certain characters in the text that is being read that cause the behavior. I noticed that character was the very last character on the page when the text of the website was extracted using a Firefox Readability extension. The extension attempts to extract just the text one might wish to read. It is this text, generally, which I have read to me by TextAloud. The right double angle quote is added by the extension. I noticed it, remove the highlighting from it and the text read properly.

My normal procedure, when browsing, is to use hotkeys for TextAloud in combination with my own scripts to have just the text in which I am interested read to me by TextAloud. My scripts work with my speech recognition software to generate the keystrokes such as the hotkeys for TextAloud. So, I can everything hands free which is good, given my hands 't work anymore.

I tried copying the offending character into WordPad and into the TextAloud document window. It seems to affect reading speed when encountered in webpages but not within WordPad or the TextAloud document window.

Firefox Readability extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... y/?src=api