making zotero accessible text to speech option?

llosier
Hello !

I was wondering if anyone has any insight or any suggestion for how to make Zotero more accessible, I am starting my honours thesis and Zotero has been a great help already! I often use text to speech tech when I am doing my readings and I am yet to find a way to integrate this usage into Zotero, if anyone has any suggestion please let me know :)

(I have a 2021 MacBook Air and have the newest version of Zotero and have recently undated my laptop to the newest software)

Thank you so much
  • dstillman
    Could you say where you're having trouble? The built-in macOS text-to-speech for selected text works in the PDF reader. Make sure System Preferences → Accessibility → Spoken Content → "Speak selection" is checked and use the keyboard shortcut defined in Options.
  • Recombinatrix
    While I don't want to speak for the OP, I do have something to add here. I use the built-in macOS text-to-speech and find that there are a few hiccups that can make it very hard to follow scientific papers. A problem for me is that text-to-speech seems to struggle with identifying that a full stop followed by a superscript citation number as the end of a sentence, and will flow from one sentence directly into the next.

    Text: "Statement A. Statement B"
    Voice: "Statement A. Statement B."

    Text: "Statement A.1 Statement B"
    Voice: "Statement A-point-one statement B"

    I appreciate that things like this are often inherent to the (varied and inconsistent) ways that PDFs handle text, and the way that text-to-speech interacts with that, and so might be very difficult to deal with inside zotero.
  • dstillman
    edited June 16, 2022
    @Recombinatrix: Yeah, we don't have anything to do with that. It would just be reading whatever is in the PDF text layer, and handling it however it would handle any text. I would expect that you would see the same results in any other PDF reader using the native TTS tool.

    For what it's worth, I can't reproduce your example, at least in a Zotero note. If I paste "Statement A.1 Statement B" into a note and have macOS speak it, it reads it as "Statement A. One Statement B".
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