iOS: Make Speak Screen read (almost) continuously in Books

Posted on February 20, 2026 by hand2mouth

At the moment, there is a longstanding bug in iOS and iPadOS wherein if you use Speak Screen to attempt to read a book in the Books app, Speak Screen will abruptly quit after a random number of pages. You can get around this to some extent by using VoiceOver (Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver) and swiping down with two fingers from the top of the screen, or saying “VoiceOver read all” if using Voice Control. VoiceOver will then continuously read until it hits a new-chapter page break, after which you can restart reading by invoking the “read from top” command. But VoiceOver can be overkill for some people who don’t need a full screen reader. Additionally, some people may prefer the Siri voices used in Speak Screen to those used in VoiceOver.

Fortunately, there is a way to make Speak Screen also read by chapter, which I found completely by accident. To do so:

  1. Open a book in Books.
  2. Open the reading menu in the bottom corner (tap the middle of the screen if you don’t see it) and enable the Line Guide (the middle icon between Share and Bookmark).
  3. Invoke Speak Screen via your preferred method, be it Voice Control or swiping two fingers from the top of the screen or Siri or AssistiveTouch menu or what have you.

You don’t need to do anything with the Line Guide; just let it sit there. But as long as the guide is enabled, Speak Screen will read a full chapter/short story/novella until it hits a new-chapter page break. As far as I can tell, this works regardless of whether highlighting is enabled or not. One caveat: In a couple of my books, Speak Screen occasionally skipped a line.

If you’ve never used Speak Screen:

Settings > Accessibility > Read & Speak > to choose a voice. Then tap Speak Screen to enable it and tweak highlighting as you see fit.

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Stop mouse settings from reverting in Windows 10: X Mouse Button Control

Posted on June 23, 2016 by hand2mouth

When I’m not using speech recognition, I’m using my trackball. My trackball drives everything, including my on-screen keyboard. Also, some of Dragon’s mouse commands rely on the Windows mouse settings. Therefore, I was rather peeved when I discovered that a bug in either Windows 10 or Synaptics resets the mouse settings–from pointer speed to scroll length–every time the computer reboots. Besides updating the drivers, I tried running regedit and setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Install\DeleteUserSettingsOnUpgrade to 0 and setting HKEY_CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WheelScrollLines to a different number, but neither worked for me, so if they don’t work for you either, you have a couple of third-party program options that can bypass the bug.

The easiest option is to install any enhancement software that came with your pointing device. I’m not fond of Trackball Works for my Expert, though, because no matter what I do to the pointer speed, it feels to my hand like it’s floating around. Also, it doesn’t offer scrolling by page. So I looked for universal mouse enhancement programs and found X Mouse Button Control, which is a mouse hotkey programmer that also handles the standard mouse functions and then some. Most importantly, X Mouse runs at boot up and overrides the standard driver, so whatever you set remains. (However, if you don’t want it to run on booting, you can disable it in msconfig.exe.)

Mainly, I wanted to keep the mouse speed and thresholds I’d set in the registry and the scroll steps I’d set in the Mouse options in Control Panel. (To increase your mouse speed beyond what the control panel offers, go to regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Mouse. Set MouseSpeed to 2 and both thresholds to 0 for maximum speed.) To adjust your pointer speed settings, double-click the X Mouse tray icon, then click the Settings button and set the speed slider to wherever you choose. You also have several wheel  options here, such as scrolling the window under the cursor or activating the window with the scroll wheel. Under the Advanced tab, there are several useful accessibility options, such as ignoring repeated scroll motions or setting the repeat rate.

To set your scrolling speed or amount, use the Scrolling and Navigation tab in the main window. You have the option of scrolling a page at a time or setting the number of lines, as well as locking your axes via modifier keys. (To set your modifier keys, click the Settings button, then the Modifier Keys tab.)

Finally, you have your standard hotkey and macro options for the scroll wheel and up tp 5 buttons, which can be global or program specific. Note: If you use dwell clicking software, your button actions will apply to dwell click buttons as well. While working native drivers would be nice, this isn’t a bad alternative.

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Fire IE: trick Dragon and websites into thinking you’re using Internet Explorer (sometimes)

Posted on December 10, 2013 by hand2mouth

I noticed recently that some sites I used at work didn’t display properly in Firefox, whether I had Flash enabled or not. At home, I couldn’t read the comments on sites that used the Disqus commenting system. They worked fine in Internet Explorer, though, and I’m really not fond of switching browsers for switching tasks. So I remembered something I tried a long time ago and discarded because of the bugs: one of those add-ons that tricks Firefox into believing you’re using IE. Fortunately for me, the bugs appear to be worked out in the add-on I’m currently using: Fire IE. Extremely fortunately, there are side effects: Dragon usually thinks I’m using IE too, and sometimes I can watch content requiring Flash while the Firefox Flash plug-in is disabled. And so Dragon doesn’t crash!

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Reviews: SpeechWare TravelMike and SpeechWare 3-in-1 TableMike

Posted on November 24, 2013 by hand2mouth

I was having one problem after another recently with the Andrea Superbeam microphone and its drivers. So, even though my budget kind of hurt for it, I bought a SpeechWare 3-in-1 TableMike.

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Online resources for lipreading/speechreading

Posted on November 7, 2013 by hand2mouth

Something struck me the other day–for all that deaf and hard of hearing people are encouraged to lipread/speechread, there aren’t a lot of classes offered for it around here. You can always practice with DVDs with captions on, or–now that Amazon and Netflix have gotten it together somewhat–streaming video. (There seems to be a glitch between Firefox and Silverlight at the moment, though, so that might not be so helpful.)

However, there are some starting places online. YouTube, once you filter out NFL and Bad Lipreading, comes up with a few things. A series of about 30 lessons offers unvoiced sentences which appear neutrally US accented and are followed by captions after a pause. Sometimes the captions are mismatched, and once the woman clearly swears. 🙂 But it’s usually pretty obvious when the sentence doesn’t match, and it keeps you on your toes. There are also a few videos in a British accent, and what appears to be an explanation of lipreading Spanish for hearing people.

If you want to go a little more polished, lipreading.org offers practice videos for vowels, initial consonants, numbers, names, and guessing missing words. The multiple choice games are useful to a point, but particularly helpful might be the lipreading alphabet at the bottom of the page. There are not only pictures, but verbal descriptions of how the vowels and consonants are formed.

If you want practice with concentrating or hearing in noise, LACE has a demo that asks you to recognize one of two competing voices–male, female, or child.

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Vocola commands for interactive fiction

Posted on July 4, 2013 by hand2mouth

It’s possible to dictate into many interactive fiction interpreters, such as Win Glulxe or Windows Frotz, but there are occasionally glitches–words run together, or the correction command doesn’t work right. These commands minimize the possibility of run-together words by inserting a space.

# Voice commands for frotz

Up = u{Enter};

Down = d{Enter};

North = n{Enter};

South = s{Enter};

East = e{Enter};

West = w{Enter};

Northeast = ne{Enter};

Northwest = nw{Enter};

Southeast = se{Enter};

Southwest = sw{Enter};

Zed = z{Enter};

Again = g{Enter};

Examine <_anything> = x{Space}$1{Enter};

Yes = y{Enter};

No = n{Enter};

inventory = i{Enter};

scrollback ={Ctrl +l};

Get <_anything> = get {Space} $1{Enter};

Drop <_anything> = drop {Space} $1{Enter};

Open <_anything> = open {Space} $1{Enter};

Close <_anything> = close {Space} $1{Enter};

Unlock <_anything> = unlock {Space} $1{Enter};

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King’s Quest 3 Redux: Point-and-click/switch access goes retro

Posted on June 11, 2013 by hand2mouth

I can’t really play computer games outside of interactive fiction. That’s all right, though; I’m a word person, and playing the contemporary games reminds me of playing things like Moonmist vicariously on my neighbor’s Tandy. I was also interested in King’s Quest 3 with its evil wizard and his ambitious servant Gwydion, but never got the chance to play.

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Onscreen keyboards and word prediction with screen readers: incompatibilities

Posted on May 11, 2013 by hand2mouth

Someone asked me about onscreen keyboards and keystroke or word echo software. There’s something about onscreen keyboards that screen readers don’t seem to like, at least if the onscreen keyboard includes word prediction or word completion. The common feature of inserting a space after a prediction might have something to do with it, as might the clipboard-paste style of inserting the prediction itself. Virtual Keyboard in particular seems to confuse things; readers like Narrator or Thunder report word predictions as “Space” or “Backspace.” But Virtual Keyboard really goes to hell with NVDA.

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Use mouse movement as a switch action: AutoHotkey

Posted on May 9, 2013 by hand2mouth

This is a script that enables you to use your mouse or trackball as a switch, turning the movement into a click. If you move the mouse cursor anywhere on the screen, the movement will send a switch action. You might have to play with the pixel value in the script, or adjust the mouse speed or uncheck “enhance pointer precision” in Control Panel > Mouse depending on how steadily you move.

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Mobility aid review: Crutcheze AirFlex forearm crutch cuff covers

Posted on May 7, 2013 by hand2mouth

A while ago, I switched from regular Crutcheze cuff pads to their newer Air Flex. The Air Flex padding is much more comfortable for me. The fabric itself is thick, so it feels like the whole cuff is cushioned; I don’t feel the edges of the cuff the way I sometimes did with the original. The inserts are neoprene rather than foam, which means the padding doesn’t compress as much or as quickly. I’d guess the padding is about a half inch thick. That’s important to me; I have a 3″ cuff and even that’s too big. I need a thick cover so that my stick stays on my arm, so I can swing it efficiently.

The thickness concern brings me to my next point: the rare perk of being one handed and things coming in pairs. While the Crutcheze cover is fine for me in winter with the added bulk of my coat and clothes, it can still slip a little on my bare arm in warm weather. The cover allows for adding extra padding, so I inserted the neoprene from the second cover into the first. All you have to do is turn the cover inside out, slip it through, and turn the cover rightside out again.

The cover also seems to go over the cuff more easily, which is no small thing with a V design cuff. Once you get each pocket a tad over each side of the cuff, you can just pull the cover straight back and it slides right on. It doesn’t bunch up like the original did sometimes.

The only problem I had at first was that the Air Flex are supposed to fasten around the back of the crutch with Velcro. That doesn’t work on the Millennial forearm crutch cuff. Even if you can get the straps around, the fasteners prevent the cuff from moving on its hinge, which restricts my movement somewhat and is slightly less safe if I should fall. So I cut off the Velcro, and it was fine; the cover stayed on with no problem. Later, I took out the Velcro stubs with a seam ripper when I noticed it snagging my backpack. That was a bit of work, my hand strength being what it is. When I asked Crutcheze for suggestions, they sent me a pair of Air Flex without Velcro. It meant a lot to me; I depend on that little slip of fabric for my stick to be usable.

Comfort and customer service–what more could you ask for?

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