Screen reader dictionary bubble disappearance on long texts

[Species8472]

On some type of documents, in this case "The Economit Chinese Edition" android app, the screen reader will not manage to read properly the characters displayed only on the screen, and displays all the text in the artcile in one page.
For long texts and articles, the auto font size becomes too small to be read ( since all the text of multiple pages appears on one page only)

A way to work around this is to set a font size that allows the long scrollable page of all the text contained in the page/article at a proper readable font size that also allows the dictionary pop up bubble to be shown. This solves the issue in this case.. mostly...

As you scroll down the text in the screen reader mode, the dictionary pop up bubble also starts to show up lower and lower on the screens as you go down the paragraphs, and eventually disappears out of the bottom of the screen.

Would it be possible to implement an option that locks the dictionary search bubble of the screen reader to be at a fixed position ? probably above the selected word would be great.

Tested on Pleco stable and latest beta of the play store .

 

[mikelove]

How about a mode where instead of actually overlaying the text on its precise locations on the screen we simply brought up a window with the text scrollable and tappable? (that's something we've been considering for cases like this)

 

[Species8472]

This is already the case in this situation with "the Economist CN" articles. I think there are some current issues with it:

- Images/charts/graphs within the article are not show, so you need to switch back and forth to read the proper article
- if you have scrolled down on the regular article, lets say 15 paragraphs, and needed to launch the screen reader for a word, the window with the text will start showing from paragraph 1, you then need to find again paragraph 15 and the specific word in the scrollable window. This is even harder because the text doesn't have the same font size and pagination. This takes some effort and is not really efficient compared to just tapping the words in the article.

I'm using a older version of the NYT Chinese Edition and blocked auto updates because the new version breaks the overlay of text on words and brings up a new window thats extremely messy.

I think in the current case it's better to fix the dictionary search bubble disappearing at the bottom first. At least it will make pleco easier to use for now at least.

 

[mikelove]

We'll add that one to our bug fix list, yes.

We're also planning to upgrade the OCR layout detection system in our next major update, which should hopefully make Screen OCR a better option for people for whom it's not working well now - in general, despite the fact that that relies on never-100%-accurate OCR it's going to do a better job of accurately reporting text locations on the screen because Android is so terrible at doing that through its accessibility frameworks.