Script Summary: This script extracts the text of the main story on a news page and displays it in a window. It is intended to be used with screen readers to read stories aloud without reading all of the garbage on the page like navigation, advertisements, etc. If a story is found, it places a small button in the upper right of the page and pressing that button shows the story. Users of screen reader software can then highlight the whole story and have the screen reader read it.
If a story is found, it places a small button in the upper right of the page and pressing that button shows the story.
Users of screen reader software can then highlight the whole story and have the screen reader read it. For example, if you set your screen reader to start reading highlighted text with the pad-plus key, then you can
- press the 'story' button created by this script.
- Press pad-plus to start reading the story aloud.
Some screen readers like TextAloud read from the clipboard dircetly so use CTRL-C instead.
This was tested with Natural Reader free edition. Use a commercial voice. The free ones stink!!
The way this script works is to recursively walk the DOM and build up text strings at each DIV level. The longest string which contains a period (which means it has a sentence in it) is assumed to be the story.
This script does not work on all pages (like the New York Times) and since some pages place different parts of the story in different DIV sections, you may get only part of the story.
