How WebOutLoud is The Most Versatile Web Reader

Jul 5, 2022

One of WebOutLoud’s greatest selling points is its versatility. It’s like the off-road vehicle of text to speech web readers. So when I found out that it was skipping sentences on some e-novels at royalroad.com, I was determined to get to the bottom of it. No matter how peculiar the HTML (and royalroad’s html is quite peculiar), WebOutLoud should read it to you with immaculate word highlighting. Skipping sentences is obviously unacceptable.

"...to be the veritable off road vehicle of web readers, WebOutLoud makes as few assumptions as possible when it comes to semantics..."

After a fair bit of analysis it turned out to be a pretty simple fix. A “one liner” as us programmers say. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that WebOutLoud now works a lot better with royalroad. Because not only did I fix the sentence skipping issue, I made the Touch Assist and “Start Reading Here” features work much better with that website’s very “un-semantic” HTML. Non web developers won’t appreciate this but what I mean by un-semantic is that it puts multiple paragraphs inside a single paragraph tag. Entire chapters of a novel are contained in a single paragraph tag, separated by line break (<br>) tags. It looks ok on screen but it’s pretty incoherent when viewed though the lens of the semantic web.

Anyway, it would have been easy to dismiss the problem, blaming it on wacky markup, but such a narrow philosophy would severely limit a web reader’s versatility because the web is a wacky place. So, to be the veritable off road vehicle of web readers, WebOutLoud makes as few assumptions as possible when it comes to semantics, which allows it to function on just about every web page—not just web pages that “fit the mold”.

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