integration of speechify for a blind student

KKri

as my son beeing seeing disabled, he is working for his studies with speechify to get his informations. The speechify addon in microsoft edge is no longer working if he opens a pdf via zotero, does anybody kno how to fix this?

adamsmith

I don't quite understand -- if you open a PDF in Zotero, it's no longer in Edge, so an Edge add-on couldn't possibly work. Could you say what exactly he is doing and what he's expecting to happen? I'm not sure how well Zotero's PDF reader works with a screen reader (I don't think very well), so if the goal is to just open PDFs in Edge, that would certainly be something that could be set up in the preferences.

KKri

thank you for your answer--yes, i told zotero that the standard way to open pdf is via edge- so i managed to open the pdf-files in edge which has the speechify addon for TTS and works there for any other (not opened via zotero) pdf pretty good.

i suspect, the problem beeing could be the reference in my browser linking to my local (Zotero) storage?

i am trying to find a way for him to organize his literature in zotero (which is great) and still be able to use a TTS (preferable speechify)

KKri

For a better understanding- he is not totally blind- he has a vision that allows him to navigate on his computer , but he is not able to read for a longer time or to see more then 1 word at a time due to his eyes condition

adamsmith

There's a button when you right click on the extension icon and then do Manage Extension to "Allow accesss to file URLs"
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u2433/22z5uztdqo4c8po2l8hz.png

You can try if it works with that checked. Beyond that, you'd want to work with Speechify support on how to read local PDFs -- Zotero PDFs are just like any other PDF you open from your hard drive (as opposed to from the web).

KKri

dear adamsmith,

thank you so much for your support.

It didn't work for me, but I contacted speechify-support for help- it's worth a try .... let's see what happens

again, thanks for helping

Imperial_Squid

@KKri

Hi, I'm not sure how relevant this problem is and if you still need a solution, but just to let you know a couple of months ago I published a plugin to do text to speech natively within Zotero

Here's a link to the plugin with details about how to install/features/etc: https://github.com/ImperialSquid/zotero-zotts

Currently the plugin uses whatever TTS is installed on the computer, not speechify unfortunately, however I've added it to my to do list to add that engine in the future.

pointgrey

@Imperial_Squid,

Your Plugin looks promising. I am looking forward for you integrating speechify in the future. I have trouble reading and I am currently importing all the pdfs I want to read from zotero into speecify. If I could speecify read it to me in zotero, it would be a time saver!