Voice Over and continuous reading

Question

Hello,
Is there any way to get Voice Over to read a long document, such as a long web page, continuously from a starting position to the end of the document without user intervention? Windows screen readers do this via their read to end feature which automatically moves the cursor down the document reading as it goes, automatically scrolling as necessary. You can press Control at any time to stop the reading to explore an item at the current reading position in more detail, then later restart the continuous reading from your new position. This is extremely useful but I cannot fathum out a way to do this on the MAC using Voice Over.
I initially thought that vo+A would do the job, but alas no. At least in Safari it only reads the current paragraph. You then have to press vo+CursorDown to read the next paragraph wich is very tedious in a long document.
If there is no such function yet in Voice Over I would strongly urge Apple to add it in the future.
Many thanks.
Paul Hopewell
[email protected]

Answer 1

Hello Paul,
Have you tried locking the VO keys? This won't make VO do what you want, but it does reduce the number of keystrokes required. Use VO-semicolon to lock the keys, then Shift-Page Down will read by paragraph, while Page Down reads by sentence. On a laptop, Page Down is fn-Down Arrow.
Alternatively, you could consider splashing out for Ghost Reader from ConvenienceWare. This provides a tape-recorder style interface, enabling you to play/pause, start/stop, fast forward and rewind on any text. You can buy it standalone or bundled with extra voices to vary your reading experience or increase the number of languages available to you.
A great many VO users have asked for the read-to-end feature, so it's likely to be provided quite soon.
Hope this helps,
Archie