Read selection aloud for comprehension and quality checking

Hi,

I would like to share a simple ahk script which I find helps me with understanding the source easily and then quality checking the target I have written. Its especially useful for long segments.

The script makes use of the immersive reader in Word. To use it you will need to have open the immersive reader in Word (under View) and Trados.

Select the text you want to have read aloud then hit F1 (or your desired hotkey)

F1:: ;read aloud
{

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
clipboard=
Sleep, 50
sendInput, ^c
Sleep, 50
WinActivate, Word
Sleep, 150
sendInput, ^a
Sleep, 50
sendInput, {Enter} ;to avoid the text being obscured by the play dialog box in Word
Sleep, 50
sendInput, ^v
Sleep, 50
sendInput, ^{home}
Sleep, 150
sendInput, ^!{space} ;this tells Word to read the text aloud
Sleep, 150
sendInput, ^!{space} ;for me, I found I need to run this command twice to work stably for both source and target languages
return
}

Parents Reply Children
  • Thank you for the replies.

    I looked at the TTS plugin but it seems quite complex to set up.

    The nice thing with the immersive reader is that it highlights the text as it reads it out, so you get a very robust visual and audio aid to comprehension of the source and thorough quality checking of the target.

    Actually if you use the immersive reader in the online version of Word it has a function to highlight different parts of the text (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) in different colours. This is also surprisingly helpful to make things clearer and easier when dealing with difficult texts. I couldn't see a way to automate it with AHK though, other than using mouse clicks.