cocoaforge

just a quick wonder, does the start and stop speaking under the edit menu actually work and if so, how?

Yes, this is a system-wide OS X feature. Select some text and choose "Start Speaking" -- Voila!

Adium has some separate speech features as well, in the prefs -- and many more on the way in a future release.

Select Text, press "Speak Text" and the computer will read it!

i selected some text and the option to start speaking and stop speaking is not selectable.

"Stop Speaking" only works if you already have "Start Speacking" on and before it finishes

Hm, I hadn't noticed before, but selecting text in the message view doesn't enable the "Start Speaking". Only selecting text in an editable field (such as the message field) will work. Odd!

Actually, looking at, it's not that surprising - Safari doesn't even have that in it's Edit menu. Likely WebKit doesn't support it due to the large amount of extra text [source], graphics, fields, etc. that can be selected. Basic text controls like text views and fields would be candidates for support, as evinced by Dave's comment.

cammy69 wrote:i selected some text and the option to start speaking and stop speaking is not selectable.

You know you can use the universal text to speech from the services menu within the application (adium) menu.

That's what he was referring to, actually.

dchoby98 wrote:That's what he was referring to, actually.

Bummer!!! I thought he was havin trouble with the text to speech from Adium's edit menu. The txt to speech within services works fine for every window in Adium as long as you highlight the text.

The speak txt option in adium's edit menu does not work in all windows regardless of what you highlight.

that was all i was trying to say.... i think

He WAS referring to the system-wide text-to-speech function in Adium's (and every other Cocoa app) Edit menu.