Floating screen reader usability issues and thoughts

[Scoox]

Pleco updated itself recently and I was pleasantly surprised by Pleco's new Screen Reader feature (well at least I hadn't noticed it if it was there).

I've always wanted to take notes on my Android device instead of using paper, but at the same time I need to use Pleco, which means endless switching back and forth between Pleco and text reader, which of course is a pain on mobile devices:

• Keyboard constantly flying in and out of view which results in scroll position changing = distracting
  
• Switching apps can take up to several seconds depending on various factors.
  
• On Samsung devices to switch to other running apps you need to press and hold for several seconds the home key, which really kills the flow.
• If you are currently looking at Pleco's definition page and switch to the text editor, when you return back to Pleco it teasingly shows the definition page for half a second and then goes back to the search page (can this behavior be turned off?), so you have to tap the entry again to go back into it.

Today I thought that the screen reader service might make things a little better by removing the need to switch apps. Unfortunately, I quickly run into some practical problems with this workflow:

1. Constant switching into and out of the screen reader: When using the screen reader it is not possible to edit text, and it usually takes not one but two taps to get out of it, one to exit the pop-up definition, and one more to return to the editor.
   
2. The screen reader appears to produce an overlay with characters that are the same size as the original text, but on some text readers (e.g. Samsung's built-in note-taking app) characters in the editor area are disproportionately big which means you can only read the first couple of lines. I was lucky to find an editor where the reader displayed the correct (original) font size.
3. Keyboard doesn't close when entering reader mode, but it closes on exit! Ideally, if the keyboard is open, leave it open, if it's closed, leave it closed. I realize this may be a problem may not be related to Pleco.
   
4. Reader only shows what's visible on the screen, would be nice to be able to scroll. Currently it takes several steps: Enter reader mode, read, exit, scroll down a bit, enter reader mode, repeat.

The ideal solution would be if the existing reader (not the floating reader, the dedicated reader) also allowed to edit text, all in one place. This would be the perfect Chinese note-taking tool and a great replacement for paper. In class I always take notes in pinyin because writing Chinese characters takes me too long and I prefer to listen to the teacher than waste time trying to write hanzi (I can do that at home at my own pace).

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

The issue with Pleco going back to the search page should be fixable by going into Settings / Miscellaneous and turning off the option to search the contents of the clipboard on startup.

Keyboard should be staying open when you exit reader mode too, actually - which reader are you using?

Pulling all the text out of the page is app- and system-dependent but we're looking at if we can support it on enough devices to make it worthwhile.

But if this is a reasonably new Samsung tablet, have you thought about using Pleco in split-screen mode? Should run quite happily alongside your preferred text editor. If you don't like Samsung's split-screen implementation you could look into getting an iPad, the Air 2 at least will support split screen about a week from now when iOS 9 is released (and having used it in the beta version I can say it's an extremely smooth / elegant take on split screen).

As for editing in the reader - it's a reasonably popular request, and something we already support on iOS, but finding the time for it is tricky - we have a lot of other things we want to do with the reader that are more popular and more central to our future plans (annotations linked to flashcards, e.g.).