Hi Alvin,
This is a long post, and I'll cc to the macvisionaries list. I have a
few suggestions for some admittedly awkward ways to input Chinese text
on the iPhone now that the language rotor is working in iOS 4. You
can either use a translation app or a Chinese dictionary app, and then
copy the resulting Chinese characters and paste them into a document,
mail message, or note. I'll describe two different apps you can use
that are both free, although I'll link the paid "pro" version of
iTranslate which, for $0.99, will support history, favorites, etc.
over the free version:
• iTranslate Plus -- the Universal Translate ($0.99) by Sonico GmbH
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itranslate-plus-universal/id294929700?mt=8
>
• KTdict C-E (Chinese-English Dictionary) (free) by Klaus Thul
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ktdict-c-e-chinese-english/id291179703?mt=8
>
Both these apps will translate text to either simplified or
traditional Chinese. You'll have to use the language rotor to change
to a Chinese voice so that the English text will be spoken in English
and the Chinese text will be spoken in Mandarin. Then, what you'll be
able to do is use the rotor in Edit mode to cut or copy and paste the
translated text into a notes app or message. I would recommend that
you use the free Simplenote app from Codality, since you can
automatically sync these contents to other iPhones, iPod Touches,
iPads through your account, and also to your computer through a web
browser with your assigned Simplenote account. There are even more
options that I know of for autosyncing to a Mac computer, but I'm
guessing you're on a PC. All these apps should work internationally
-- I even checked that the two linked apps are available in the
Singapore iTunes App Store.
With iTranslate (or iTranslate Plus) you can type text into the first
text field in English, then set the translate button to Chinese.
Here's what I hear if I do a two finger flick up to read all when the
app launches: "Translate from","English, dimmed","Text Field", "img
speaker touch, dimmed button", "button underscore switch underscore
lang", "to", "Chinese Simplified, dimmed", "Text Field", "img action
touch, dimmed button", "button underscore favorites underscore big",
"button underscore info underscore big", "Powered by Google". So this
is a simple screen with the "translate from" language set in the top
half of the screen, with its text field, and the "translate to"
language in the bottom half of the screen, with its text field. The
"button underscore switch underscore lang" button at the left edge of
center allows you to swap the "translate from" and "translate to"
settings, so that you work with the same language pair, but reverse
the translating direction by switching the button settings for the top
and bottom half of the screen. I think the app originally loads with
the "translate from" language now set to "Detect Language". Double
tapping either the "translate from" language of "English" or the
"translate to" language of "Simplified Chinese" (both announced as
"dimmed", incidentally) brings up a picker item wheel in the bottom
half of the screen that lets you change the language by flicking up or
down. Once you've chosen your language, you double tap a "Set
Language" button in the center of the screen, just above the picker
wheel, to register the selection. You similarly choose the "translate
to" language by double tapping its button and using the picker wheel.
Then, I double tap in the text field to input English text, This
brings up the virtual keyboard with buttons for "Cancel", "Clear", and
"Translate" running across the center of the screen, just below the
input text field and above the virtual keyboard. Type in your English
text with the virtual keyboard, or through a Bluetooth or iPad
keyboard dock keypad, then double tap the "Translate" button at the
right edge of center. Your screen will go back to the original two
text box layout, and you'll hear "Chinese Simplified" for the dimmed
"translate to" language button. Flick right to the text box, and
you'll hear the translated text announced in Chinese (if you have set
the language rotor to Chinese before checking this field). To select
the text, use the rotor to set to edit mode. Flick up to hear "select
all" and double tap, then flick up to hear "copy" and double tap.
You'll be able to paste the text that you heard spoken in Chinese into
another document or note, and it will contain the Chinese written
characters.
The two buttons at the bottom of the app are for "favorites" at the
bottom left corner, and "info" at the bottom right corner. If you
double tap "Favorites" you can access a list of "History" or
"Favorites" and replay old selections. The "Info" button lets you
control settings, configure font size for the text used, and adjust
voice rate or purchase voices for a subset of languages in the app.
For settings, you can reduce the number of languages displayed in the
picker wheel by double tapping some of the 53 entries so they are not
selected. Just flick down the list and double tap to de-select, then
double tap the "save" button at the top right corner. When you review
the "languages" entry under settings, you'll now hear "10 of 53" if
you unchecked 43 languages, for example. (Actually, if you're using
Chinese in the language rotor, you'll hear the numbers announced in
Chinese, but everything else in English.) In the "Add-Ons" you can
buy additional text-to-speech voices for use in this app, through in-
app purchase. This will not help you, because there are no Chinese
text-to-speech voice options, but other users can preview and purchase
the Loquendo voices and purchase them for $1.99 each. You can also
probably Google the Loquendo web site and sample the text to speech
voices there. These are the voices that will speak the text when you
double tap the "img speaker touch" button in the "translate from" text
field, or the "img action touch" button in the "translate to" text
field, if you have bought voices for these languages to use in the app.
The problem with Google translation in apps like iTranslate is that it
may not give you the phrases or words that you want, although you will
know which characters are being used from context, and because the
Chinese text will be read out in Mandarin, The advantage is that you
will get large sections of usable text that you can copy into a
document, and then you can delete individual characters and words that
you don't want.
To get specific words, or references to historical characters,
literary references, etc. try using the KTdict C-E app and its ability
to let you search and copy Chinese text. (You can also copy the
pinyin romanized input.) There are both free and paid versions of
many Chinese dictionary apps, and there is a paid version of the
KTdict C-E app that I haven't tried. In this case, make one of your
keyboards set to enter text in Pinyin so you can type with alphabetic
characters. For multi-word phrases, you don't need to type accents,
but you have the option of typing a number after each word to
represent the tones, e.g. "ma3", for horse.
Now, to take your example of Pinyin text entry, type in "hua wen" (for
Chinese), and have the language rotor set to Chinese so that both
English and Chinese text will be read out. You can read down the
results list with a two finger flick down, or just flick right twice
to the second entry, which will announce the meaning (after repeating
the words in Chinese) of "Chinese language/Chinese script".
Double tap the selection to go to the results page. You'll have
entries both under English and Chinese, and you can double tap any of
these results. For example, you'll have under "English" two items
listed: "Chinese language" and "Chinese script". Double tapping
either of these entries is the same as typing in "Chinese language" or
"Chinese script" as the English meaning into the search field. You'll
get another list of Chinese characters and their definitions, but it
will be based on the English meaning input matches. Under "Chinese"
you'll have two text entries in Chinese characters. The first will be
written in simplified characters and the second will be written in
traditional Chinese characters. Finally, under "Pinyin" you'll have
an entry for "hua wen" with accent marks indicating the tones over the
letters. If you double tap this entry, you'll get a menu with buttons
to "Search hua2 wen2", "Copy hua wen" (in the Pinyin form with the
accent marks over the letters), and "Copy hua2 wen2" (in the Pinyin
form spelled out here with numbers indicating the accents), along with
a "Cancel" button. Again, double tapping the search button for
"Search hua2 wen2" is just the same as if you typed in your search
terms with the numbers for the tones included in the original search
field.
OK, what is interesting for you is what happens when you select one or
other Chinese character results by double tapping. As you might
guess, you will be able to copy or save the text in Chinese characters
-- either simplified or traditional depending on whether you double
tapped the first or the second of the entries. What actually gets
displayed is a large version of each character of the word written in
either simplified or traditional format and filled the whole screen
(so that a low vision user might be able to read this -- especially if
it were on an iPad display). Again, you won't hear anything announced
without the language rotor set to Chinese. If you did a two finger
flick up, you'd hear "Result, back button" (in the top left), "hua
wen, heading" (label at the top of the screen), "hua" (for the first
word's character, when you touch almost anywhere on the screen),
"hua" (for the pinyin version in Roman characters, just below the
Chinese character", then "Page 1 of 2" (only with the numbers
announced in Mandarin), and then "Select character, button" (bottom
left) and "Select word, button" (bottom center). A three finger
flick to the right would bring up a second screen for the "wen"
character. The way you can tell that the character is in the heading
and the center of the screen is that if you set the language rotor
back to English, and do your two-finger flick or any type of flick,
you won't hear parts of the screen read out where the characters are
written. What you want to do is double tap the "Select word" button
at the bottom center of the screen. This will bring up options to
"Search hua wen", "Copy hua wen", and "Cancel", where the word is now
used in its character version -- either simplifed or traditional. If
you now exit the KT-dict C-E app for a notes app, you can use the edit
rotor to paste in the words you've copied.
Sorry this is so tedious, but at least it gives you some options.
There may be better ways to do this, but I haven't had access to a
language rotor until yesterday's update, and so have had no
opportunities to explore this on the iPad, as I had hoped to do. I
also wouldn't give up on the possibility of using handwriting
recognition. For one thing, there are a number of apps that screen
capture what you draw or write on a screen. I could imagine that one
of these apps could send the results to a Chinese handwriting
recognition program. Also, the iPad's USB camera kit connector is
supposed to support many other devices, and one of these could be a
drawing pad. Finally, I know there are developers who work with
Chinese input apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, even though these
are not currently accessible. There's an app called "Finger" by
Headnix, which interfaces the input with Mac computers. This may not
help you if you're using a PC. I'd really like to know whether there
are available Chinese language voices for VoiceOver on the Mac, but so
far I've not found any. Let me know if any of this works for you.
The other possibility is to use a voice recognition app that outputs
to Chinese text and to Chinese language, like Trippo VoiceMagix, which
recently debuted in the app store and uses the Nuance voice
recognition engine for input of spoken text. This is the best voice
recognition engine I've used for U.S. English accents -- better than
Vlingo and Google Voice in its accuracy. It's what powers Dragon
Dictation. It sounds as though the developer plans to release versions
to other English language app stores relatively fast -- Canada already
has this. I've tried this on the iPad, since there is no working
language rotor yet for that platform -- at least for users who don't
have the special Apple Store distribution discs. You could try
Jibbiggo's Chinese English bi-drectional speech recognition and
translation app for $24.99. I just don't believe it could do a
reliable job with Chinese speech recognition given the incredible
variety of accents even for Mandarin. At least, I'm not ready to
spend the money to try this out for Chinese, where correctly
recognizing the tones make this more complex than Japanese English or
Spanish English translation as far as speech recoginition goes. YMMV.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
Alvin wrote:
Hi Dave
Thanks for your reply.
It is not possible for blind user to hand written chinese
character. You have to turn VO off first. Next, there is no way
you can find the little square input pad. Lastly, without VO, there
is no way the blind can select the suggested characters based on
what you have written.
So, I have discarded the idea of writing chinese character by hand.
What I have been complaining so far is the bug in which suggested
characters are read based on the pinyin you have input. For
instance, if I input 'hua', VO will just read hua, another flick
will cause VO to read another hua. So its not possible to know
whether its hua wen for chinese, or hua er for flower.
Hope you can appreciate what I have said so far.
Thank you.
Alvin
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: Chinese VO
Hi Alvin,
I'm a Mandarin speaker though not by any means able to write. As I
understand it, iPhone uses the touch surface to allow you to input
the
character by drawing it; it then presents a list of potential matches
for you to select. How you could make this system accessible would
probably depend largely on your ability to write in Chinese; the list
of character suggestions could probably be spoken by VO.
I think it's a good opportunity for a third party to step in and meet
your particular need and manner of writing.
On 6/21/10, Alvin <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi
I am sure almost all of you wouldn't care what I am going to rant
here as
this something to do with the bug in chinese VO.
As soon as I have my iPhone in last October, I have been
constantly talking
to the apple tech support and writing to the accessibility team.
Apple did
not fix the bug in 3.1.2 and 3.1.3, and now iOS 4 is released and
they still
did not fix the bug.
All I can do all these while is listening to chinese VO, and yes,
just
listening. There is no way I can input chinese character using
chinese VO.
I am very disappointed. Beside accessibility team, who else can I
talk to?
Steve Job?
Thank you for listening.
Alvin
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