Accessibility on Text to Speech (TalkBack nowadays)
-
Hi, I've been using the website on my phone for quite some years since I've gotten into a good series and whenever I get hooked on to a REALLY good part, I just want to keep going, and this week has been a binge reading since I've last left off.
Since my work is mundane and boring with no one to talk, I normally would use Google books to "Read Aloud" and let me "read" the books without having to look down at my phone.
But now that I can't wait for the next volume, I came back to the website in over 4 months and every now (coming back and waiting for the next volume), I noticed a few things changing, but Text to Speech (TTS/ TalkBack) ALWAYS worked no matter what... until recently. Not exactly sure what changed as of... the past 4-5 months, that my tts no longer reads the texts and only reads the menu around it (the links and whatnot). It makes me sad that my favorite way of listening to/ reading the series is gone and I don't have a hearing impairment, but I would imagine people who do might not be able to enjoy it just as much as I have for as long as I have.
I personally can wait for the Google books release to "read" the next volume, but I think having this accessibility option of returning the text back to being "readable" by tts will help those who don't have the luxury like me.
-
@SonofGod1998 Have you tried using the "open in a new tab" button in the reader? That will load up the reader only (on a labs.j-novel.club URL) which I believe was added to deal with some of the issues some TTS applications had when the new reader got deployed. Couldn't tell from your post if you've already been doing that and it just no longer works, or if you're doing it from the reader that's embeded on the main site (j-novel.club URL).
-
@jpwong Hi, thanks for answering me and for teaching me something new (so no, I didn't use this), but as far as it goes on mobile, "open in a new tab" did not work and it still treats the book as its own element without being able to read the text itself. Just tapping the text doesn't let TTS to read the actual text.
To add insult to injury, I went ahead and tried to get TTS on the app itself to read it to me and it does... at the cost of never being able to pause it. If I ever wanted it to go back and read me a section or sentence, I have to start from the beginning of that part, something I don't want to deal with since I do get interrupted. I already knew about this since way back and testing it again just showed me that nothing has changed when it comes to TTS on the app.
Edit: I will say though, on desktop, TTS works just fine after "opening a new tab", but I'm not really paying attention on PC as I'm moving around with my phone at all times and Google books works just fine.
-
@SonofGod1998 The other thing you could possibly try is the alternative PWA client someone coded. You can read about it on the forum link below. Since that renders the page in a more standard format, it might work with your software if you want to give it a shot. Do note that site is not run by JNC, but I believe it leverages the APIs JNC has made available.
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/3353/yet-another-pwa-jnc-client
-
@jpwong Well, once again, it works just fine on Desktop but on mobile the TalkBack... which I guess I should be more specific, I use the default Android text to speech software which is now called TalkBack, which even after getting a new phone and using JNC with TalkBack it was working fine a year ago, until recently and this PWA didn't help on mobile. I can wait for the next release on Google Books or whatnot but once again, it'd be nice to have this fixed and not be forced to leave the website for something that can be done here =T
-
@SonofGod1998 Hi there, so it's been a good long time since I've talked about this, but I've found a solution for those still interested in using text to speech on mobile (like me). Since TalkBack is treating the book like an image, it has given me the option to "describe it" and then it'll recognize the text and read the extracted text like normal. The only downside to this is that it can't automatically keep reading like before, instead I have to keep swiping and make it describe the next page each time, but just to stay up with the series, this is good enough solution.
As for iPhone users, my sister uses an external app that does the same function, just screen shoots the pages and makes the tts app to read the extracted text from the image/pages.
