Upgrade StorageAvailable for beta testing: Smarter Read Aloud
dstillman
Zotero Team
The latest Zotero beta brings a big upgrade to Read Aloud.
Read Aloud should now do a much better job of skipping in-text citations, headers, and footers. It'll also skip past tables, figures, and equations instead of reading out every table cell and axis label, and it'll read paragraphs straight through even when they continue in the next column or on the next page.
For large documents, it should also start speaking more quickly.
This is all based on a new custom document-analysis system that identifies different elements of a PDF, EPUB, or snapshot, which also forms the basis of a new Reading Mode for PDFs. We're still refining this system, so if you find a document where Read Aloud is still reading things it shouldn't — or skipping things it shouldn't — let us know in a new thread.
By default, Read Aloud will also now highlight individual sentences as it reads them instead of highlighting entire paragraphs, and we've added dedicated buttons to skip ahead or back by sentence. If you prefer to have it highlight by word or paragraph instead, you can configure that from the General pane of the settings. (Word highlighting is available only for some voices.)
Read Aloud should now do a much better job of skipping in-text citations, headers, and footers. It'll also skip past tables, figures, and equations instead of reading out every table cell and axis label, and it'll read paragraphs straight through even when they continue in the next column or on the next page.
For large documents, it should also start speaking more quickly.
This is all based on a new custom document-analysis system that identifies different elements of a PDF, EPUB, or snapshot, which also forms the basis of a new Reading Mode for PDFs. We're still refining this system, so if you find a document where Read Aloud is still reading things it shouldn't — or skipping things it shouldn't — let us know in a new thread.
By default, Read Aloud will also now highlight individual sentences as it reads them instead of highlighting entire paragraphs, and we've added dedicated buttons to skip ahead or back by sentence. If you prefer to have it highlight by word or paragraph instead, you can configure that from the General pane of the settings. (Word highlighting is available only for some voices.)