Hi,

for the past week I've been developing a text-to-speech Firefox extension which lets the browser speak aloud the text on page. It works by point & click so no manual selection is required, and its interface is discrete in that it avoids to show cumbersome widgets like extra toolbars or foreground windows. It also works on Iceweasel and alike.

It is currently in the Mozilla's addons queue, pending for final approval before going public.
If you'd like to give it a beta test and see how it works, you can find it at Mozilla on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...k-text-reader/

Any feedback appreciated!

The link returns a 404 not found from Ireland. Are you sure it's correct?

Link fixed, thanks!

It's google's TTS engine, isn't it? I recognize the voice. It functions, but needs work on the UI. I am finding it rough, but no doubt you are improving it as you go. The page I pointed it at was about slackware multilib. It talked from the top, ignoring what I had highlighted, and kept going, talking about 'slackware three two bit" and 'multileeb'. They have theirs set up for the tiny speakers on phones/tablets. It sounded like it's nose was blocked.

Ivona's engine on the Android isn't bad. Have you tried that?

Thanks business kid for a preliminary test

Indeed the UI is still raw as it's yet an early "basic" release (version 0.99d), but will eventually support arbitrary text selection. For the moment, the selection works in a point&click fashion in that it automatically selects the text paragraph under the mouse. In case the page doesn't define any paragraphs at all (eg. all the page text is dumped there w/o formatting) then the whole page is considered one single paragraph. Bad, and to be fixed.

Last correction... "32" is now pronounced correctly

Is there a hot key or mouse combination to make that thing play? Trying to read a page like this thread is quite frustrating: You mouse over text; it highlights a box, You move the mouse to press play, and it forgets the box.

I would comment that the icons need a little dotted box around them, or else a change on the settings icon, which is not settings, but selection. The stop is unnecessary if you can code an exit on change of page. Play/Pause is sufficient.

Unless the page is full text, it seems to barf. I am going to uninstall, as it complicates my layout. When it can read pages like this thread without difficulty, post, and I for one will try it again.

Houch, thank you for the sincere thoughts :P


Actually, when you highlight a text box via the selection tool, you just have to click upon that highlighted text to start playing it. It's just a 1-fold action and the play button doesn't need to be pressed manually.

At least this is how it's intended to be, excluding eventual bugs.

That did not happen, at least not on LQ for me with Firefox-32.0.3. Sorry to sound so negative. I got the feeling it was going top down, met images and boxes, and hung. It just sat there 'playing' but there was no sound. If you're writing software, you need reality, even if it's harsh.