Voicing opinion

For many years I would read the paper MacFormat magazine at the same time as doing various jobs around the house. When I initially swapped to the digital version on my iPad, I found it a bit frustrating since it was difficult to keep stopping to scroll down the page to the next piece of text. Then I realised that I could select all of the text on a page and use the Speak option to allow my iPad to read it to me while I got on with my job. Most of the time it uses the default English male voice, but once in a while the text is read in a completely different voice and language – the article on Music IO in Issue 288 uses a female voice in an unknown language.

Can you please tell me what determines the voice/language that is used since there is nothing on the page to indicate which will be used? Geoff Hawke Alan Stonebridge says… The voice that’s used is picked in Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Voices, but you can pick just one at a time. I’m unsure why your iPad is not sticking to that; check there’s a tick next to the one you want to hear. Sadly, you can’t use this with MacFormat any more; our new production software doesn’t render text as HTML. The upside is the digital edition’s design will improve in the coming months. Christian Hall says… Printers are particularly guilty of not lasting too well on the software side, drivers are often left languishing as new models come to market so quickly.

This is likely to be less of an issue in more recent versions of OS X – many printers out now will go back to 10.8 or even 10.7, but it’s not uncommon for 10.6 to be beyond them now. As you’ve invested a lot in your MacBook we understand your wanting to keep hold of it, and you shouldn’t feel pressured to move on. But, hardware incompatibility with 10.6 is likely to hold you back. We did find that the late 2014 Canon Pixma MG5650 works with 10.6.8 though, and that can be found for around £50.