Filtering left angle bracket

[ancLogan]

My textaloud version 4.038 is filtering the left angle bracket "<" whenever I tried to listen to audio.

[Jim Bretti]

The problem is that when the Sapi5 speech interface sees a left angle bracket in the text, it expects the angle bracket to be followed by a control tag that does something like pause, change the voice speed, change the volume, etc. TextAloud automatically filters stray left angle brackets to prevent errors when speaking text.

You can solve the problem by creating a TextAloud pronunciation dictionary that 'respells' the left angle bracket as something else. For example, from the TextAloud main menu click Control Center -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. You could create a pronunciation dictionary entry that looks like this:

Text Matching: Simple Text
<

Pronounce Using: Respell
Less than

So set the Text Matching dropdown to "Simple Text" and use a left angle bracket for the text to match. Set Pronounce Using to "Respell", and respell the left angle bracket as something else. In the above example I'm respelling as 'less than', but you can use any respelling that does not include angle bracket characters.

Also note that the Word Boundary Condition dropdown is used to specify whether the match requires 1 or more word boundary characters (like a space) on the left, right, or both sides of the matched text.

Let me know if this doesn't work or if you need help

[ancLogan]

Jim, thank you for your recommendations. Your suggestions worked perfectly.
Thank you.