Wondering if there is any Text to Speech software available as a plug in for IE or Firefox.
WebAnywhere is a university project aimed at creating a site that allows you to use text to speech from any browser at any location, without installing anything or using any plugins.
You can try it out and see for yourself. I was pretty impressed with it when I first heard of it.
There is also NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) which is an open source general purpose screen reader for Windows.
It is built in for Safari on Mac OSX. Highlight any text and go to the menu, Safari > Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text.
Fire Vox
Fangs
I know you asked for plugins for IE and Firefox but I thought I'd just add that Opera supports text to speech (both for issuing commands and for Opera to read web / email to you) out of the box (in Windows and possibly Mac OS).
See the Opera Voice page.
Windows Narrator is part of a default XP installation, and can be used in any browser. I also suggest you try out Thunder, which is free and can work with IE and most other Windows apps.
For Firefox, there is LowBrowse, which has text to speech for the
paragraph that the cursor is in.
Related
I am working on an automation project, in which I need to capture the activities [ application launched, data entered, input type etc.] user performs on a desktop. I came across Microsoft UI Automation framework which so far works well for native windows based applications like MS Office, .NET apps etc. However I did not find any useful information / samples of capturing the information from different web browsers [Chrome is a must], Python apps, Java Apps etc. Can someone please confirm whether MS UI Automation Framework supports such apps. Any working example to extract user activities from these apps would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Chrome only supports UI Automation for toolbars, tabs, menu, buttons around the web page. Everything that's rendered as a web page is not seen by UIA.
For the web page content, the easiest way is to use Selenium (driven by the ChromeDriver), which is kind of a de facto standard for browsers, and has nothing to do with UIA.
To test if an app supports UIA, and how far it does, it's very easy, just run UIA's Inspect tool and check the UI tree over that application.
Some additions to Simon's answer...
Chrome page content can be seen by UIA if you run chrome --force-renderer-accessibility. Only for existing Chrome process it won't work. Though user can create a new tab chrome://accessibility manually and enable UIA for all or some chosen pages. This method also works for AT-SPI accessibility technology on Linux. Of course, Selenium WebDriver is an industry standard here. But another way exists. Both Mozilla and IE support UIA by default.
Inspect.exe can be simply downloaded from this GitHub repo.
Regarding Java apps it depends on the app type. Your chances is about 50/50.
WxPython or PyQt5 are good for UIA. TkInter or Kivy apps are not.
P.S. There is an example how to drag a file from explorer.exe and drop to Google Drive in Chrome using Python library pywinauto.
I'm a bit late to the party..
But Chromes accessibility features are only activated once something tries to access it's accessibility.
If you call AccessibleObjectFromWindow ([DllImport("oleacc.dll")]) with the window handle an existing chrome window will have its accessibility activated (and you'll see the actual web page content in UIA!).
If the chrome window is opened after your app is running - Chrome pings open processes for any open accessibility apps... for that you use AccessibleObjectFromEvent and the event you're responding to comes from the windows pipeline: EVENT_SYSTEM_ALERT = 0x0002 .
The bottom line is - you have to tell chrome that there's something installed that wants to access it's web page content.
Oh! and your application has to be signed!! Unsigned apps won't be able to access web content - I think that's the same in firefox too.
I hope this helps someone in the future.
See:
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/accessibility
I currently have a Chrome extension that uses Chrome's APIs and plan on making a Microsoft Edge version once it opens up as well. My question is how do you work with the multiple API's?
For example, I use the following to check if the extension has just been installed or not:
chrome.runtime.onInstalled
I'm assuming for Edge it would be something like:
edge.runtime.onInstalled
What's the best way to work with both of these? Do I just duplicate the code within the file where there is a copy of the code for one and the other and presumably the browser will ignore the other browser's code? (doesn't sound like the good option)
Or is there some cross-browser framework that I should use instead?
Or is there some other solution?
And please forgive me, this is my first entry into building extensions/apps, I'm generally just a Web Designer.
Thank you!
All browsers support or
chrome.runtime.onInstalled
or
browser.runtime.onInstalled
So, the right way is to start scripts in your extension with this code:
var browser = browser || chrome
And then use browser, for example:
browser.runtime.onInstalled
(I'm sorry about my english)
Edit:
Chrome and Opera support chrome and not browser.
Firefox support chrome and browser.
Edge support browser and I don't know if it support chrome.
Anyway, my solution work in all browsers.
Update (5.8.16):
Edge support browser and not chrome.
I'm developing a mobile website for iPhone, Android, etc. using jQuery Mobile. I'd like to be able to test this in my desktop browser and was wondering what the best approach is. I guess I could use a plugin to change the User-Agent header to the appropriate value and manually resize the browser to the device's width, but is there a simpler/more reliable way?
Update
Sorry, I should have mentioned that the only hardware available is a Windows laptop
Well if you have a Mac and xCode is installed you can use the Simulator. Open Mobile Safari and point to you web page on all Apple devices
You can also use the Android Emulator ( But I've not tested that it can access the web from the browser )
Alternatively you could use a plugin ( as you have suggested ).
I personally use Chrome with this plugin:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ljfpjnehmoiabkefmnjegmpdddgcdnpo
with pretty good results.
I've used Device Anywhere before
http://www.keynotedeviceanywhere.com/
you access the device through a web portal/site and control it, but this costs $$$
Actual device testing in going to be the most reliable
related:
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/10-excellent-tools-for-testing-your-site-on-mobile-devices/ ( other suggestions )
Difference between iPhone Simulator and Android Emulator
In Chrome hit F12 to open the Developer Toolbar. Then click 'Toggle device toolbar' (tablet icon, top left next to select element). You can then choose the device at the top to test.
There's also PerfectoMobile for testing on devices remotely...though it can be painfully slow. I'd really recommend at least getting some 'base' testing devices, if possible.
There is also http://www.browserstack.com/responsive that can be used to get a screenshot of what your site would look like on a number of given devices.
There is however a limitation of how many screenshots you can get in the free version I have linked to here.
I got nice results, visualy, by using Chrome add-on called Ripple Beta. Bad thing is that there is no ability to add some custom device, like tablets of 8" or 9" or bigger... but works. I'm not sure is it able to show some errors visible on real device but seems nice.
Manymo should work very well simulating Android for you. It shows me exactly what my cell phone shows, even though my desktop browsers don't. Manymo is a website with a lot of Android phones pictured. Just click one and enter your URL. There are options such as Android versions and screen sizes.
Look for the Chrome plugin Responsive Web Design Tester - you'll be able to emulate mobile browsers for different device sizes on all platforms.
Since Metro style IE cannot play Flash videos, what can I do?
Use the non-metro or desktop version of IE or use another browser. Otherwise - this is not the right forum to discuss such issues.
We have been facing a weird problem with PDF documents displayed in Safari. This problem is reproducible in many of our machines. The problem is like this..
Adobe Reader has support for hit highlighting in PDF documents when it is being viewed in any browser. For example,
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.pdf#xml=http://www.somesite.com/words.txt
This URL should highlight the words specified in words.txt file. But, unfortunately many of our Safari browsers (on Windows machines) don't highlight any text in opened pdf file. The same URL works fine in rest of the browsers (IE, Firefox and Chrome). I could not figure out where the problem is!
Can anybody please help me on this?
Thanks in advance,
Safari uses a built-in PDF plugin exclusive to safari (even on iPhone)
This is different from the Adobe's plugin and the API is different too.
Most of the things that work with the Adobe plugin won't work with the one inside Safari.
you may be able to find information about forcing Safari to use the Adobe Reader plugin (Google is your friend) but that would be a per user setting, something you cannot control on everybody's machine.
I'm also looking for help on this to control pdf files inside safari using javascript.