Design Options for Orator (text-to-speech) widget

At today's design crit ( 28 Aug 18) we talked about the current design/implementation of the Orator component. The Orator is the UI widget to control in browser text-to-speech/self voicing.

In the current implementation there are two options for voicing text on a page.

• Play back all the text from the main content of the page using the play/pause button at the top of the page

• Select text and click the play button that pops up over top.

Below are options to improve the user experience of the Orator. Please note that at this time there was no clear direction to take, rather it was decided to try to wait till after the upcoming APCP pilots (October?) to hear user feedback, and go through further design iterations.

• For the play pop, remove or turn into stop or pause button while selected text is being read

• Put all UIO related enactor widgets in a common location (currently just Table of Contents, and Orator).

• Put the Orator controls into the adjuster panel

  • problem when using full page UIO

• Put the Orator controls on the pull down tab with show/hide and reset

  • problem for UIO+ which doesn't have a pull down tab

  • problem for full page UIO which doesn't have a pull down tab

  • problematic for mobile presentation which already takes up a full row at the top of the screen

• Have Orator start reading immediately when enabled and allow for user to place cursor to start reading from a location.

  • not sure how to handle when Orator is included directly on a page and not via UIO/prefs framework

• Always have reading start from where cursor is placed, have the popup follow along with the read text or blocks paragraph where text is being read from currently.

• Have page autoscroll with text that is currently being read

  • could make this an option

  • could only read what is currently visible