BUG: Read Aloud tool advances visible text only when reading at 1.0 speed?

It seems that the Read Aloud tool advances the resource text along with the reading voice only at a reading speed of 1.0x. When reading at 1.4, 2.0 and 0.75, the reading voice continues beyond what is shown on the screen and the text does not advance. When I scroll down to keep up, it causes the reading to stop and re-set.

I don't know if this behavior is new to Logos 8 or existed in Logos 7. I've only just now started using the Read Aloud tool.

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Mary-Ellen

After all my experimenting, the text has stopped advancing at 1.0x as well. And I don't see Read Aloud on the Tools drop-down menu? Although it is in the new Help file, and the Ctrl-R shortcut toggle works to open the tool.

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1009860#Comment_1009860

I also have two copies of my resource open and linked, so I can hover over footnotes (which the Read Aloud tool ignores). The linking has gotten a few lines out of sync. Time to close Logos and restart....

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1009861#Comment_1009861

Maybe that was all it needed? Linking is working again, text scrolls along at 1.0x, and when I clicked on speed to up it to 1.4x, the text scrolled at the end of the screenful as well. I'll report back if I run into any more problems.

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1009863#Comment_1009863

Oh dear. When I clicked the play button on the read aloud bar, after having paused it to post here, it again failed to advance the visible text to keep up with the reading. This was at 1.4x speed. I will close Logos and restart again, and hope to hear some insight from the forum. [:)]

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1009864#Comment_1009864

More info: I have now been careful to change the reading speed only after "pausing" the reading tool. I am also now seeing that the displayed text does scroll along at 1.4x and at 0.75x, "sort of."

Sometimes the scrolling will work smoothly for the first screenful of text. But after that, if my screen display ends in the middle of a paragraph, the text doesn't "scroll" until the reading voice reaches the next paragraph. Then the screen display jumps up to position the new paragraph near the top of the window. This means that, for paragraphs longer than a couple of lines, I may never actually see on screen some of the text that was read.

This is not ideal, but is it perhaps the way the tool is designed to work?

My aging eyes have vision issues that have made reading quite tiring and irksome. I'm hoping to use the Read Aloud tool to let me rely on my ears more than my eyes for book-length material--but not to the exclusion of my eyes. Seeing the text displayed is still very important for me. "Losing" several lines of visible text per screenful is about as irksome as waiting for floaters to pass and peering around cataract obscurities. (Those under 50 might not know what I'm talking about. [;)] )

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1009879#Comment_1009879

Eureka, I think I've found the reason for my problems with the Read Aloud tool!

This morning I tried the reader at various speeds with my text in a much larger panel. It occurred to me, if the reader is looking for paragraphs or other markers to align with, the window I was using yesterday might not have displayed enough text for the reader to "orient" itself properly. With a larger window, I see the reader working smoothly at all speeds, advancing the text in more-or-less a paragraph-by-paragraph manner, always well before it reaches the end of the text displayed on the screen.

Can anyone familiar with the Read Aloud tool comment?

John Fidel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010388#Comment_1010388

Hi Mary-Ellen,

Lots going on with your post.

I am on a Mac L8 SR1. I open two ESVs in separate panes and linked them; turned on read allowed and show word by word indicator.

The ESV that was reading allowed tracked with the word by word indicator just barely behind. The linked ESV tracked without issue.

What am I missing so I can try and duplicate your issue?

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010417#Comment_1010417

Thank you, John, for jumping in! I'm on Windows 10, reading a monograph (Among the Gentiles, by Luke Timothy Johnson) in two linked panes. The word-by-word indicator is grayed out. (I assume it's a feature for Bible texts only?)

In general, I think I've learned that to use read-aloud happily for monographs, I need to use a window large enough to show several full paragraphs of text. For smaller windows, I run into the problem I will try to illustrate with this series of screenshots.

Here's where I start:

When I start the read-aloud (with Ctrl-R), the bulls-eye appears where the blue circle is in the shot below, and the screen backs up a couple of lines:

[hmmm, can't seem to insert next image, will create a new post and try to continue there....]

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010867#Comment_1010867

Second screenshot still won't appear. Tried saving as .jpg, didn't make a difference. Maybe has to do with heavy load on Logos servers at the moment? I notice a relatively lengthy "establishing secure connection...." notice in the lower left corner of my browser.

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010870#Comment_1010870

I tried starting over to create the second screenshot, still won't appear. Will try to explain in words without the picture, hopefully not 1000 words!

Imagine that when I start the read-aloud, the screen in my post above backs up a couple of lines, and the reading commences with the word "detail" (which you can see at the upper left corner of the window). With this shift in the displayed text, the last few lines of the big paragraph beginning "Religiousness A and B" no longer appear on the screen. (In fact, the screen now shows only two partial paragraphs; neither paragraph is fully visible.)

The reading voice keeps reading through the end of the top partial paragraph, and then begins with the next one, "Religiousness A and B...." But when it gets to the end of what I can see of that paragraph, the screen doesn't advance. The reading voice finishes reading the off-screen lines, finishes the whole paragraph, before the screen shifts. The screen shifts only when the voice gets to the beginning of the next paragraph (coincidentally the next page?), "The eschatology of Religiousness A and B". The voice was reading the last few off-screen lines of that big paragraph, but I couldn't see them.

Now I start to panic as the voice is reading perhaps a couple of sentences that I can't see. I think, "when is it going to scroll forward? how much am I missing?"

Notice that there is a footnote 8 at the end of that big paragraph. This footnote has info that I would like to at least glance at as I read. I can hover over it, or even click on it, and the footnote text will display without interrupting the reading voice. This is great! I can visually "read ahead" of the voice, and absorb the text and the footnote in the time that it takes the voice to read the text aloud. I can even decide whether this is one of those relatively rare cases when I want to pause my reading, and make a note or a highlight, or take a short detour and look up a definition or do a bit of research, before continuing on reading my monograph.

But I can only do this mental processing if the footnote indicator is visible and I can see that it is coming up. In this instance, by the time the screen advances so that I can see there is a footnote, the voice has started in on the next paragraph. Now I'm distracted, back-tracking and trying to play catch-up, and I lose the author's train of thought. Yuck!

And if the off-screen ending of that big paragraph had been very lengthy, some of it would have been cut off at the top of the next screen, when the screen advances to the next bulls-eye. My eyes are looking for the continuation of the text that I could see, but that point has already scrolled off the screen, gone forever. I get so distracted figuring out where I am and how much I've missed, that I'm completely doomed!

The good news is that when I open the resource in a bigger pane--big enough that several full paragraphs appear at a time--the reading voice seems to advance more-or-less paragraph-by-paragraph, and advances the display so that it is always reading from paragraphs that are fully displayed on the screen.

John Fidel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010870#Comment_1010870

I don't have that resource, but opened another monograph. I am on a Mac, but it appears that the screen only changes at heading titles. I think this is a bug with L8. There have been a few posts regarding reading aloud, but I have not followed them.

That said, there are some options to having two instances of the same book open:

open the power lookup and have it follow. It will give you the footnotes.
set the book to "one column" and check show footnotes on page.
go to reading view with footnotes on page.

I have not been able to get any of these to track, but it may make your process less cluttered once the bug is fixed.

I will review the reading aloud posts to see if this has been identified as a bug. If not, I will report it.

All the best.

Mary-Ellen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1010895#Comment_1010895

Thanks, John, for your thoughts and ideas, and also for your power-user research!

Shalom to you and yours!