WeDispatch 1.33: one sentence of your article becomes a link
An eleventh player template: your listener selects a passage and gets a link that starts exactly there. And across the client area, changing a setting now tells you it has been saved.
An eight minute article shares badly. You send the link, you add "listen around the middle, there is
a good bit", and nobody gets there. This release adds a player template that fixes exactly that
moment, and tidies up something quieter: what your settings screens tell you when you change
something.
The shareable quote
It is the eleventh player template, it is called "Shareable quote", and you pick it like the others
in Appearance.
Under the playback bar, the full article is displayed, and each word lights up as the voice reaches
it. So far that is what guided reading already does. The difference is the gesture: your listener
can select a passage with the mouse or a finger. As soon as they do, a bar appears underneath
with the second that passage starts at, and two buttons: copy the link, or copy the quote with its
link.
The link they get opens your page, and the player starts exactly at the sentence they chose.
That last detail was the whole point. Building a link to our own player would have been simpler: a
bare page, one button, nothing else. Most tools do that, and it is a poor deal for the publisher.
Someone clicking a quote from your article should land on your site, on your article, with your
layout, your links and the rest of your pages around it. A share that bypasses the page it quotes
brings nobody back to you.
Who it is for
Articles that get quoted: interviews, op-eds, debates, council reports, speeches. These are the
formats where someone wants a precise thirty seconds heard, not a whole file. A link to one sentence
travels much further than a link to eight minutes of audio, and it lands on your page.
What it needs
This template needs to know where every word sits in the audio. That is what our reading engine
produces, and it is the same data behind word by word highlighting and behind fixing one passage
without resynthesising the article.
In practice: an article voiced recently has it. An article produced before that change does not, and
the player falls back to the compact bar, breaking nothing and showing your visitor no error. You
see it on your side: the Appearance screen states, for each template, what it requires of the
article and whether your account provides it.
There is a second condition for the link to start in the right place: the page has to load our
integration script. That is the case with the WordPress plugin or the one line script tag. If you
placed an iframe by hand, the link still works, but it opens your page at the start of the article
rather than at the chosen passage.
A changed setting says it has been saved
Since the start of August, every settings screen in your account saves on click: no more "Save"
button at the bottom of a card you had to have expanded to see it. The principle was settled, but
each screen announced it its own way, and some announced nothing at all.
Eleven screens said eleven different things. Five showed nothing while saving, so you could not tell
whether the click had registered. Six displayed failures in their own style. None of those six
announced anything to people using a screen reader, which means, very concretely, that they changed
a setting with no way whatsoever of knowing it had gone through. And exactly one offered to retry.
It now all runs through the same mechanism. You change a setting, the screen says "Saving" then
"Saved". On failure the message stays on screen with a "Retry" button: it does not fade after two
seconds the way the confirmation does, because a failure asks something of you and a success does
not. Switches return to their previous position when the save did not go through, rather than
sitting on "on" and lying about it. And all of it is announced to screen readers.
Nothing changes in what the product does. What changes is that you know where you stand.
Two more pages on the site
The WordPress plugin and our approach to reading French now have their own English pages, for
bilingual teams and for newsrooms outside France that publish in French. They are not translations
of the French pages: they answer different questions, in particular the one asked by someone who has
to buy French audio without speaking French, and who needs to know what to listen for in order to
judge it.
The links, if you want a look: the WordPress plugin, reading
French, and the player template picker in your account to try the
shareable quote on one of your own articles.
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