Skipping

The plugin does a fairly good job of automatically ignoring code and just reading the text. However, while it might make sense in theory for it to read image alt text for accessibility purposes, and someone else mentioned this as well, it doesn’t really work out very well in actual practice.

For example, if you have a gallery of images, it’ll simply read the alt text for each image, one after the other, without any context. And even with context, it wouldn’t really offer any benefit to listeners anyway. It’s just confusing/jarring. Of course, that’s only my opinion.

In any case, we need a way to be able to omit parts of our post content which should not be added to the audio.

What I’m trying to do is utilize the “Skip tags” setting to have control over this. So, I’m using a custom HTML tag, <skip> ... </skip> to wrap around areas I don’t want read and then adding the tag to the “Skip tags” settings. I’ve tried adding skip and <skip> to this field, and neither work.

I did find an apparent official way to omit content from text-to-speech:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/CustomizingWordPress.html

Using:

-AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-START-
Something that shouldn't be read into the .mp3 file here.
-AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-END-

However, the doc is a little confusing, incomplete, or out-dated.

Adding these tags, as expected, has no effect. Maybe they’re supposed to be shortcodes instead (that would make more sense)?

[AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-START]
Something that shouldn't be read into the .mp3 file here.
[AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-END]

Or maybe they’re supposed to be HTML comments?

<!-- AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-START -->
Something that shouldn't be read into the .mp3 file here.
<!-- AMAZONPOLLY-ONLYWORD-END -->