1456336 - [narrate] Allow the user to control where the text to speech in reader mode starts

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, enhancement, P5)

Description

[fiveNinePlusR]

I would like it if reader mode remembered where the text to speech feature left off and also have the user be able to set the starting position on the page if they want to skip ahead or behind and start the text to speech over again.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Do you have specific ideas about how the UI/UX for this would work? How would users set this position and/or discover the UI to set it?

Comment 2

[fiveNinePlusR]

I was thinking that it could be done by pressing a button in the narrate menu and that enables a hover effect that will highlight a paragraph on the page that the cursor is hovering over. Subsequently clicking on the paragraph would trigger the read from that paragraph's start position. Looking at the code I believe that that would be the least amount of work to implement and still be a nice and usable feature.

Comment 3

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Currently, narrate will start at the top visible paragraph, so if you are mid-article you won't hear it from the start. Furthermore, you can skip around the page with the seek back/forward button.

I don't know if the proposed solution would necessarily make it easier to get to a specific paragraph.

One problem we have is that pause and word tracking are not supported on all platforms, so we can't use those in the interface. This makes it hard to support resuming speech mid-paragraph.