Thousands if not millions of old books have been digitalized and many of them use a different looking "S". If you've never seen an old book before check out wikipedia's article about the LONG S.
Or you could go to archive dot org and do a text (book) search by typing in a year, such as 1801.(17,968 results found for search term 1801) For one year alone around 18k books, most of which might use the archaic type font. Can Text aloud read this font? Or are there literally millions of the best most valuable and knowledgeable books on the planet, written in english by the way, totally unreadable by textaloud software, because of a single letter? This would seem quite absurd to throw away centuries of knowledge and thousands if not millions of books from something as simple as a single letter?. I do hope this will be looked into if Textaloud can't currently read these books, or if it can. FANTASTIC!!. Let me know please.
If speech engines have trouble with the long S character, the character can be translated in TextAloud, since we can key on it as a character. If you need to translate the character try these instructions:
From the TextAloud menu click Tools -> Text Processing -> Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance. Create a new dictionary entry. Set the Text Matching dropdown to 'Simple Text' and paste the long s character in the text matching field. Then set Pronounce Using to "Respell", and enter an s character in the respell field. The Word Boundary Condition should be set to "No Word Boundary Required". So like this:
Text Matching: Simple Text
ſ
Pronounce Using: Respell
s
Word Boundary Condition: No Word Boundary Required
If for any reason you have trouble pasting a long s into the text matching field, you can also do this translation using the characters hex code, set the text matching dropdown to "Regular Expression" to do this:
Let me know please. 