A few issues with chrome extension (TextAloud Version 3.0.102)

[tocwick]

I have been using chrome extension for a while and have noticed following problems -

• Though the main application reads roman numerals correctly, the chrome extension doesn't. It reads them as individual alphabets.
• Chrome extension will read a period(.) at the end of a paragraph as dot instead of simply taking a pause.

Chrome extension is an important part of the whole package for me (and may be for majority too, as chrome is the most popular web browser after all), and I would appreciate if devs can have a look at these issues.

[Jim Bretti]

Thanks for reporting this. If possible it would help if you could send me links to page(s) where you're seeing the problem. If the page is part of a service that requires a login, like web mail, just let me know the name of the service.

Problems like this are often voice dependent, so also let me know what voice(s) you're seeing the problem with.

If I can see some examples we may be able to come up with workarounds for one or both problems.

Just post the information here, or mail it to me at jim@nextup.com

[tocwick]

I am using IVONA voices, Brian (UK) and Salli (US) to be precise.

I experienced both problems on - http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mafia-3 ... 0-6416544/

1. The Roman numerals pronunciation problem seems to have disappear.
2. The second problem still happens. That is the last period of a paragraph is read as dot instead of just a silent pause.

I thought I posted a reply earlier, but may be I closed the tab too early or something before it was successfully submitted.

[Jim Bretti]

Thanks for sending the link, I see what is happening with periods at the end of a paragraph, we're not handling this page formatting correctly in the extension. We'll look at fixing it, but there is a workaround available.

Basically the problem is when our extension extracts paragraphs from this page, there is no separation between paragraphs. So TextAloud is seeing something like this from the extension:
This is the last sentence of one paragraph.This is the first sentence of the next paragraph.

There is no space after there period, causing voices to read the period as a dot. The work around is to force a space when any punctuation character is between two alpha characters.

Here is how to create the workaround.

From the TextAloud menu click Tools -> Text Processing -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Create a new dictionary entry. Set the Text Matching dropdown to "Regular Expression", and for the expression try this:

(?<=[a-z][.?!])(?=[a-z])

Next set the Pronounce Using dropdown to "Respell", and for the respell field, use:

<s>

Case Sensitive checkbox should *not* be checked

Set the Caption to something like Browser Paragraph Fix

If you're not familiar with regular expressions it is a text pattern matching language. This expression is looking for a letter, followed by end of sentence punctuation, followed by another letter. The <s> in the respell field is interpreted as a space, so we're just inserting a space after the end of sentence punctuation.

Let me know if you have questions about this or if it doesn't work around the problem.