If you read a lot of scholarly literature, particularly in the social or natural sciences, you're doubtless familiar with the pain of having to listen to long strings of in-line citations like "(Gwen, Einstein, 2008 [1905]; Calvin and Hobbs 1989: 57)" etc., etc. After 30 years of putting up with this, I finally realized that, for how ever many years now, NVDA has a speech dictionary that accepts regular expressions. These are extremely powerful and inscrutable strings that match very flexible and complex patterns. So, I wrote a regular expression to recognize lists of two or more in-line citations, then plopped it into a speech dictionary entry that replaces them with "CITATIONS". Accessible e-readers like Voice Dream and Listen2 have a similar feature. If you need it, you know it.
Here's how to do it:
- Go to NVDA > Preferences > Speech Dictionaries and pick whatever scope you want it to be active ("default" is global, "Voice" is for the current voice, and "Temporary" disappears on restart).
- Add an entry and paste the following into the "Pattern" field:
\([^)]*?(19|20)[0-9]{2}[;:\],a-z]{1,2}[^)]+?(19|20)[0-9]{2}.*?\)
- Enter whatever you want into the replacement field. Text in the "comment" field will appear in the dictionary entries list. "Case sensitive" doesn't matter.
- Change "type" to regular expression.
- Hit ok, then ok again.
- Whip up a test document or open something heinous to read.
What it actually does is match text inside parentheses that contains at least two dates from the 20th or 21st century, with optional text of any kind before or after the dates. The first date also has to be followed by the kinds of things that mark it as a citation in APA or Chicago style, including a colon before a page number, semicolon, lowercase letter (2025a, 2025b), or right bracket (for a secondary publication date).
It's certainly not bulletproof, but it's working plenty well enough for me. Hopefully, it works for you. I do a lot of scholarly reading, so find it life-altering.
A couple of things to point out: If a word in the parentheses has been marked as misspelled, NVDA won't match it. Also, there obviously won't be a match if the citations break across lines, so this works best when reading by sentence or paragraph. And, of course, moving into the citation list by word behaves normally.
For a truly awe-inspiring application of regular expressions, check out the Markdown Navigator addon by Cary Rowen.
Comments
Nice.
Sadly back in my college days, I would have been terrified to mess with read-aloud citations. I may or may not have once been accused of plagiarism because I typoed on a flipping comma inside of a citation...
No.. really.. Lit Profs can be notorious for such behavior.
Anyways cool find all the same.
Oh, and agreed on MD Navigator. 😊
OMG
I didn't know I needed this until I read this thread. Very, very useful. Though now I'm in the program I wanted, I hated social science just because of citation hell... Just sayin.
Is there any accessible, easy to read short document for the popular styles like MLA/APA? The textbooks on bookshare are so long that they are not useful. I mean, most of the doc we're given are untagged pdf, at best. And the dynamic websites are not very accessible. But again I have never understood anything to citations so. LLMs can be useful but not to match the exact version required - I am talking about feeding it with all the data needed and letting it format for you, not the stupid generating citations which... well, there are lawyers who got caught doing just this...
I don't know much about regex but gpt has detected some edge cases but again as the author said it's early start and don't ever pretend to be complete or bulletproof, still thanks a lot for your work!
TheBlindGuy07
There is a piece of software in development that may be of interest to you. The only problem is that the website is in French. Still, you could always look at it through a translator and see what you think.
The website is:
www.BiblioSphere.fr
Bro I am in quebec
I learned French way before English...
Which is why I suggested it. 😝
I am aware of your locale, as you have said so many times. That is why I suggested the website, even though it is in French. However, other folks may want to check it out as well, which is why I suggested using a translation service.
See? I am thoughtful like that. 😎
@Brian
1 point for you then.
You show so proudly you're no longer in macos, it's so fun to read your links mostly full windows things average blind users don't even know lol.
Irony
A decade ago, and I was all gung ho for macOS. And then Catalina happened...
I still say Apple should've called that version of macOS, "catalyst", as it was the beginning of the end for a lot of people due to SNR.
Go back even three years, and I was still on my MacBook Pro, but pretty much solely running BootCamp Windows 10.
Now in keeping with the thread topic, back in my college days, I was absolutely terrified to mess up on a citation. There's a reason, though nowadays that reason escapes me, but at the time I really liked ASA over MLA. For the life of me I can't remember why that is nowadays though. I loved riding citations under that format regardless. I used to use websites to get a sample of proper formatting, then I would just copy paste a template, and fill in the blanks. I'm sure there's probably an iOS app or three that can do this for you nowadays.
Here's a link to Purdue Owl, really good for MLA, and APA guides. As a college student, you likely already know about this website, but I'm putting it here nonetheless.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html
Citation NAZIs
Brian, I'll bet I know why you were terrified: every error was a point off. Once, my Shakespeare prof (a prof of Shakespeare, not the man himself, which would have been awful because he'd always be talking in iambic pentameter), threatened to fail both me and a visually-impaired friend because, me having a computer and him not, we pooled the references we had in common using my copy, then adjusted the assignments to differ on the ones that only he or I had found. We had to go to his office and show him the difficulties and the fact that we'd only shared typing. What had set him off in the first place were three typos I made. In high school, back when you could actually get educated, at least in the accelerated classes, I got whacked for every missing comma or semicolon.
I would never use the regexp when *writing* citations; it's for reading them when you don't need to hear them all.
I've also created regexp macros for Notepad++ that mimick the Markdown Navigator addon, but without browse mode. I can never remember to exit browse mode before I start typing.
Writing Profs are for the birds
I touched on this above, but I had an American Literature Prof who was also the Dean of the English Department at my university. She setup a meeting in her office one afternoon shortly after turning in an essay. Instead of simply informing me of any typos and/or missing information, she kind of lost her s*** and started accusing me of plagiarism and threatening to have me expelled.
Personally I think she was on a power trip, because upon review of the work by other faculty and my state's agency for the blind, it turned out to be.. one.. flipping.. comma.. that I missed on a particular citation.
In the end she was made to see the error of her ways. My state's blind agency may or may not have made some lawsuit threats. Regardless I was allowed to correct the essay (see: Adding a single comma), and resubmit the essay for credit.
So yeah, I became hyper focused from that point on with regards to citations/bibliographies. 😖