Select to speak a specific UI element
Feature summary
For people with disabilities especially visual impairment such as myself. Though i could read text with magnification sometimes its hard to read or comprehend articles or smaller text in which case a screen reader could come in handy reading everything on screen out loud. however, i do not prefer using a screen reader as it is hard to navigate the screen with screen readers. It would be nice to have a simpler solution a way to just quickly read text from selected area aloud. This feature could help a lot interms of reducing strain while reading documents, large articles, or just reading text with smaller font sizes, reading hints in settings, etc., this could improve productivity a lot. Even for people without any disability this could come in handy to verify what they have written on lets say a document, a blog or more could help a lot in identifying mistakes and more.
This feature can be found in Smartphones with Android it adds a little shortcut icon for select to speak clicking wich allows users to drag and select a section of screen and then text from the selected area is read aloud.
Similar feature exists with Magnifier in windows. After enabling magnifier we could use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Enter
or Ctrl+Alt+Click
to read text aloud.
Find links for both below
How would you like it to work
One way is to ad an icon for select to speak on the top bar, After clicking the icon (activating select to speak) user could then drag and select a section of the screen, a window or a webpage where then text from selected area is read aloud with a TTS. If possible highlighting the words currently read aloud.
Additional Expectations
- A shortcut for terminating text to speech preferably
Ctrl
as soon as user hitsCtrl
the TTS should stop reading and select to speak should be deactivated. - An easy shortcut to activate Select to speak.
- There should be a scope limiting what section could be read aloud
- The Select to speak must be able to understand and interpret Parent child relationship of elements
For example
- On a webpage when user selects a section from start of
<Article>
to one of its children<p> then TTS must continue till it reaches
` End of the parent element - Similar case shall apply for desktop apps.