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nvaccess / nvda

NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows
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Add temporary speech rate setting #16431

Open Adriani90 opened 5 months ago

Adriani90 commented 5 months ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Very often users read a text such as an article, a piece of complex information, a part of text in another language etc. For these purposes, it is problematic to generally adjust the speech rate permanently because you always have to adjust it back to previous levels. Especially when using many different profiles, this can become annoying. In the worst case users end up with different speech rates for different profiles and the experience doesn't feel so nice.

Describe the solution you'd like

Jaws provides a way to adjust the speech rate on demand via a key stroke, but the speech rate is reverted back to previous level when you switch the window back and forth with alt+tab or when the title of the focused window changes. I think this very flexible speech rate adjustment is quite convenient. So i propose to add two key strokes to NVDA to adjust the speech rate only for the focused window which applies until user switches to another window. Maybe nvda+alt+home and nvda+alt+end? In this case, Jaws doesn't say the percentage of the speech rate, it just says "slower" or "faster" while these words are pronounced slower or faster as the speech rate changes. This could be implemented in NVDA as well. Alternatively, these commands could be implemented in such a way that they don't interupt the reading, but they would just adjust the speech rate on the fly while NVDA continues to read.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Leave as is.

Additional context

The revert to saved configuration command is not an alternative because it reverts multiple settings in case users changed more than the speech rate. Reverting all the changed settings is not needed in this case.

XLTechie commented 5 months ago

What are the Jaws keys (U.S. layout) for these?

I have thought for a while that Jaws' implementation of read to end/say all, has things going for it that we don't. This is likely one of them.

seanbudd commented 4 months ago

This request needs some more support from the community for it to be accepted. We are concerned that it covers a rarely used edge case, that can generally be handled through profiles and resetting your config with nvda+ctrl+r after temporarily adjusting speech rate.

Adriani90 commented 4 months ago

Hmm I think speech rate is quite obviously one of the mostly needed settin in this regard. But ok…Von meinem iPhone gesendetAm 23.04.2024 um 02:08 schrieb Sean Budd @.***>: This request needs some more support from the community for it to be accepted. We are concerned that it covers a rarely used edge case, that can generally be handled through profiles and resetting your config with nvda+ctrl+r after temporarily adjusting speech rate.

—Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: @.***>

Adriani90 commented 3 months ago

@seanbudd wrote:

We are concerned that it covers a rarely used edge case, that can generally be handled through profiles and resetting your config with nvda+ctrl+r after temporarily adjusting speech rate.

  1. Profiles: this is not convenient in this case because you would have to set it back manually every time when you don't need it, but the temporary setting is something people need on the go and only for a certain task, it should not affect the profile permanently
  2. Reload config with nvda+ctrl+r: that's a good alternative, but unfortunately NVDA reverts the configuration of other profiles as well when pressing the key stroke (e.g. the configuration of the standard profile is reverted as well). This is not what we expect in this case. Also the NVDA+control+r command reverts also other settings which are not expected to be changed only temporarily, such as e.g. reporting of tables etc. So this is not an alternative, see additional context in the description.

Jaws uses ctrl+alt+page up and down for adjusting the speech rate temporarily until the title of the currently focused window changes (e.g. when opening a link to a new web page), and / or until switching the window back and forth with alt+tab. I find this feature very convenient in practice.