I set Start Speaking to F11, and Start/pause speaking to F8 (after clearing the current use of F8).
F11 doesn’t do anything.
F8 seems to do what it says it does.
The two menu items for speech, as listed in the keyboard options, are Stop Speaking and Start/Pause Speaking. (In practice, this shows as “Continue Speaking” in the Speech menu when you’ve paused the speech in the course of reading the document.) So long as I removed F8 and F11 as shortcuts from their original menu items, I was able to apply either for either speech option and use it successfully. Could there be a global conflict with the shortcut?–i.e. might you have it assigned to something outside of Scrivener which affects multiple programs? (Note that F11 by default is assigned to toggling Composition Mode, but from your other post I’m assuming you cleared that as well as the F8 default.)
I certainly thought I had (and just confirmed; F11 is not currently assigned to anything, and each F-key assigned is only assigned to one thing). I’d also tried Ctrl+shift+z (after clearing its use also), and that had issues, too.
I honestly don’t use text to speech much; I was playing with the shortcuts and ran into the problem.
So, an update of sorts –
I now have the two of them assigned to F7 and F8 (and all other assignments of those have been cleared; I never used whatever they were, anyway).
F8 works just fine, and I got F7 to stop a speaking voice.
So I guess it’s good; it just wasn’t working with F11 or Ctrl+shift+Z. Not sure why. Well, I’ll report it again if it happens again.
Curious. Yeah, let us know, and if you encounter it again, I’d check for conflicting system shortcuts (especially if you use anything like AutoHotKey to create global macros with keyboard triggers).