Text-to-Speech

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This package enables speech synthesis in the Plone CMS.

It is currently based on ResponsiveVoice, an HTML5-based Text-To-Speech library designed to add voice features to web sites across multiple plataforms.

ResponsiveVoice supports 51 languages through 168 voices and is free for non-commercial use.

Mostly Harmless

Got an idea? Found a bug? Let us know by opening a support.

Known Issues

• Voice playback rate is slow on Android native browser
• Voice is cut off in shorter text on Android native browser
• Audio doesn’t play on Firefox Android

For more information, see ResponsiveVoice FAQ.

Some browser add-ons (e.g., Privacy Badger), could block ResponsiveVoice library disabling the Text-to-Speech feature. In those cases the 'Listen' button will not be available, neither the Text-to-Speech control panel configlet will work.

Don't Panic

Installation

To enable this package in a buildout-based installation:

1. Edit your buildout.cfg and add add the following to it:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    collective.texttospeech

After updating the configuration you need to run ''bin/buildout'', which will take care of updating your system.

Go to the 'Site Setup' page in a Plone site and click on the 'Add-ons' link.

Check the box next to collective.texttospeech and click the 'Activate' button.

How does it work

We use JavaScript to extract all text inside an element with id="content" in the page. The text extraction will ignore any <iframe> elements present. Currently, <img> elements are neither processed but that could change in the future.

It is possible to avoid reading some text that, regardless being present on the text flow, make little sense on the reading flow. Examples of this are image captions and side quotes.

We have included a list of CSS classes that can be blacklisted to implement this feature. The list is configurable via an option in the control panel configlet. Any text inside an element with one of those CSS classes applied will be ignored.

The blacklist defaults to some CSS classes used in Plone 4:

• image-caption: used for image captions
• pullquote: used for side quotes

Usage

After installing the package, go to the Text-to-Speech configlet on Site Setup.

Select which content types will have the feature enabled and select which voice will be used.

The Text-to-Speech control panel configlet.

A viewlet with a 'Listen' button will be displayed on objects with the feature enabled.

The speech synthesis feature enabled.

You can pause/resume the reader at any time by selecting 'Pause'/'Resume'.