Been away from writing my novel in Scrivener for nearly 9 months due to an illness in the family. In that time I’ve upgraded to an M1 Mac mini. Now that I’m getting back to writing, I’ve encountered an odd thing that might be a bug that has to do with Scrivener scrolling down— by itself— from words I’ve selected and am trying to have the computer speak using the accessibility features of MacOS.
Note: This problem does not occur when I use the Scrivener Edit Menu-> Speech-> Start Speaking. It only happens with I use the Accessibility speech features which I will detail below.
I really like to have the computer speak back what I’ve written and like it so much that I’ve set things up to speak selected text with a single key, F6. (Yep, I use it that much)
I used this process to set it up:
System preferences-> Accessibility-> Spoken Content-> (Checked “Speak selection” and then clicked the “Options” button to bring up an box where I set up the F6 key as the single key (without a second modifier key which it will ask about) to speak selected text.
I’ve been using this set up for several years and it’s worked perfectly in any program including the last time I used Scrivener about 9 months ago. It still works with any other program but I’m experiencing some weirdness with Scrivener now and I don’t know if it’s an M1 mac thing, a mac Big Sur thing, a Scrivener thing or some combo.
The weirdness is that if I’m writing in the editor window in single document mode on any page other than the first one (this is critical— to not be on the first page of a multipage document) and select some text and press F6, then Scrivener will begin speaking the selected text, but instantly start scrolling down (almost paging down) the document away from the selected words.
Example, I just selected a paragraph of 104 words to speak on page 2 of an 18 page document, pressed F6 and as it spoke them, it scrolled the editor down on its own to page 17 before the speaking stopped and the scrolling stopped.
To further add to the weirdness, when Scrivener speaks the words, it highlights them in a different color than the normal highlight color for selections.
Even stranger, is that this scrolling problem doesn’t happen in composition mode— although it does highlight the spoken words in a different color as it speaks each one in composition mode.
Summary:
When selecting text for the computer to speak on any page except the first page of a multi page document while using the Accessibility speech function in MacOS which has been assigned to a custom key, then Scrivener will speak the selected text, highlight the words in a different color as it speaks them and quickly scroll the document down until the selected words have finished being spoken (possibly many pages away.)
Note: this problem does not occur if using the speech functions in the Scrivener Edit menu.
My Set up:
Scrivener 3.2.2 (14632)
MacOS Big Sur 11.5.1
M1 Mac Mini
(Sorry for the long post and poor summary, but hopefully it gets the point across.)