Hi all.
I know Book Reader more or less does this, but I don't know about the other two.
I know both Speech Central and Voice Dream play books, sort of like audio books. That's fine, if I'm just reading. But I also might want to copy text, find out how something is spelled, or what have you. So I would also like a program that just displays text I can read with Voiceover. Think of reading a file in TextEdit, for instance.
As i understand it, Book Reader puts its text in a web view, so in theory I could read with Voiceover's standard commands, as well as playing the book, if that's supported. Do theother two do this as well?
Honestly I'm tempted to roll my own reader program, but that won't happen for a while, since I need to learn programming on the Mac first. So I'll be buying one of these three programs. Hopefully not *all* of them eventually, but you never know I guess. Before anybody mentions it, yes, I know Voice Dream is a subscription. If it does what I want, and nothing else does, or it does it the best, I'll subscribe.
According to a friend of mine Books has changed, which explains why I find the reading experience for epub pretty terrible. I wouldn't mind hitting right arrow to turn pages, if ti worked consistently, but it doesn't seem to. So I need another reader, and these three seem to be the most popular. But I also need something beyond the equivalent of an audio book, if possible.
Thanks for any info on these.
Comments
My Experience
Do not pay for the VDR, it is much worse than the others. Speech Central is fine, yet not perfect either. Developers tend to ignore that we also use VoiceOver when reading books, it is not only through the built-in speech features. No single app I am aware of gfor reading that allows you to read sentence by sentence or allows you to select specific content. VDR may allow some of those, yet it is clunky. Also if you want to select you need to use the cursor of the app.
For now, the only thing you may do is to use Speech Central and export the books from there in Word format, Speech Central allows this feature. Yet you lose on other aspects like commenting and bookmarking content.
What I do is I use Speech Central, and I am only able to copy the whole paragraph, I paste it somewhere then do all I need with it. There are other solutions but they are all far from ideal.
My Preference
I prefer to read with voiceover. Personally, I don't use built in speech apps, reading with my own screen reader gives me more control about my reading preferences. So I read in apple books or Preview with voiceover.
Have you tried Books in 15.1?
It's kind of a mess. No continuous scrolling, and I don't seem to be able to get it to move pages consistently. What I mean is, say I'm in Ch. 11 of a book, and it has chapter notes. If I hit VO-a, it reads ch. 11 and the notes, then stops. It tells me about moving to the next page. If I do that, and hit VO-a, it reads from the beginning of Ch. 11. If I do it a few times, it's in a different chapter, usually in the middle, and I don't know that it's Ch. 12.
Ideally I'd like to do just what you're doing, read with Voiceover. However, while some things read well enough, TextEdit, Preview, one feature they lack is bookmarks. So if I'm reading a. long document like a book, I have to try and remember where I was to do a find or something, and I'm not even sure how that would work in Books, although I do know Books has bookmarking functionality. But I haven't messed with Books too much, see above experience.
But yes, ideally I'd like to just use Voiceover to do my reading. I don't mind playing things on the phone or watch, essentially an audio book with a synth narrator, because I'm usually not in a position where I might want to do something with the text. On the Mac, that's a different story.
RE: Speech Central
I do agree with Maldalain on the comment regarding my app, but I would like to provide somewhat bigger perspective which sheds a different light.
At the moment, Speech Central has over 100 non-trivial adjustments made specifically for blind users. When I say non-trivial adjustments it means that I ignore things like button labelling for the buttons that otherwise don't display text. Those adjustments are things like different layouts and different behaviours.
The only other app that does such non-trivial adjustments is Voice Dream, and it provides 2 such adjustments, and while that number may be small it did serve as an example and starting idea for me. All other apps in this world together have 0 such adjustments.
This certainly took quite a bit of an effort, but my app has over 100,000 lines of code and from that perspective most lines are still the same for everyone.
Your request means that my app would be designed from ground up for blind people specifically. That means many thousands of lines of code at minimum, and probably one 0 more than that.
Unfortunately, that is not possible. Blind people represent just 3% of my users even though their use is subsidised.
On the other hand, VoiceOver is a tool to make visual interfaces accessible. It does what it should do. Visual reading requires various sort of interactions and as such inconveniences. What you feel like "inadequate" is most frequently exactly the reason that people with regular eyesight pick to use audio mode over the reading with their eyes (and why they use the app at all).
That's entirely fair.
Not entirely, because, as an example, I'm pretty sure you can set TextEdit to a read only mode. What I'm looking for is something like that, where you get essentially, an edit window you can't actually write in, where the text is displayed. Then if you interact, you'd be able to use arrows and all the standard commands, e.g. opt-left/right to move by words.
To be clear, I get that your app doesn't do this, and why it doesn't. And as I mentioned, I think that's great in certain situations. If I'm reading with my watch or phone, I'm not in a situation where I need to quote Lord of the Rings in an email or something, most likely anyway. So there it being an audio stream is really convenient. I can start it and stop it easily with headphone controls, move through it with them, and so on.
Now, imagine I'm reading a book on Swift programming. There, I need to know that it's foo(int x, float y);, and not foo.(int x, float y) or such. Even though I'm just reading it and not editing it, I kind of need the level of inspection I would get if I were editing it, if that makes sense. Also the ability to go back over it repeatedly can be useful.
So I mean, it's just a different tool for a different job, in some ways. I wouldn't even say I don't want it on Mac, I read a fair amount of fiction. So if I download something like that from Bookshare as an epub, right now it sounds like Speech Central will give me a *much* better reading experience than Books will, at least as Books currently stands.
So I absolutely get what you mean about designing it specifically for the blind being a potential issue. In fact, I've advocated for years that what we want ideally is just what you're doing, a thing that's not *just* about accessibility but is universally applicable, so to speak. It's just that I *am* a blind reader, obviously, and there might be cases where I need or want something either specifically for me, or done in a way that makes more sense for me, braille being an obvious case that only applies to blind people and isn't really something that can be made universal.
Plus, let's be real here, I'm old, LOL! I've been using computers since the mid-eighties, and pretty much on all of them, you read text in some sort of text-based interface you could move around in, think less on Unix systems, if you've ever used that.And if, like Less, you couldn't readily select text, you just opened it up in an editor. So I'm just used to text as, at bottom, something you can easily manipulate in various ways.
Having said that, I just realize I have one thing that's over a hundred separate Word files. I'll bet Speech Central has a way to deal with that where I can read one thing, instead of opening over a hundred files in succession. So now I know which one I'm buying.
RE: That's entirely fair.
Thanks for this nice description which I agree with completely.
I can only say that I thought to mention that maybe the particular use case we were talking about was covered by the edit text functionality, but I wasn't sure so I skipped that.
Based on what you have said I was close - that would work if the editor was disabled.
If that resolves problem, I can add one more menu entry for VoiceOver users that would open this in read-only mode, or have a button to disable the editor in the current screen (again only available for VoiceOver users).
I would need few suggestions:
1) Which approach is better (I am on the side of the button as this may not be used by all people so this would make less of a clutter for them)?
2) What title would you suggest (This is a bit harder I think).
Can anything be edited?
I would probably go with a button, and call it whatever TextEdit does. But really, you don't need it to be read only, well, I guess it could help because then you wouldn't inadvertently edit.
In TextEdit, it's in format, which doesn't strike me as the most obvious thing in the world, and it's called prevent editing. Maybe "read only" in the view menu? If we could assign a keyboard shortcut to it as well, that would be incredibly helpful. Or maybe be able to set it as a default if we want?
But really, if you can open any document that can be spoken by the voices in an edit field you can just move around in, that solves my problem right there. That would be awesome because it will be the best of both worlds, using VO-a to read and having selection commands to copy text, and the voices and the ability to play texts like an audio book.
I use VDR
I use VDR, only because it allows me to play .txt books, word documents, etc. But it most importantly allows me to play zipped audiobooks, all in one app. If Speech Central did that, I'd switch.
RE: Audiobooks
I would say that audiobooks aren't generally a good fit for text-to-speech apps.
Out of thousands of text-to-speech apps on all platforms, only one has this functionality. Actually Speechify did try to add Audible like functionality to its app but it was later removed into a separate app.
Simply put huge majority of people perceive this as different categories and prefer to use two apps for that.
Mostly we get into the same question as above - if someone builds an app particularly for the blind people it is much more likely that he will implement this functionality in a single app. But the problem with such approach is that it misses huge majority of the market and as such it is likely to receive less funding which brings issues on its own down the road.
While I don't completely rule out audiobooks for the simple reason that they don't make the app more complex for users that want to use them, they are of fairly low priority.