Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2002 01:16:14 -0500
From: "Dale Leavens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Do screen readers stumble badly over misspelled words?
Hi,
Well yes and no. It is only partly the responsibility of the screen reader
to get pronunciation correct, the other part is the method of speech
synthesis. All speech synthesizers have some accent for want of a better
term. They usually sound a little like the stereotypical Scandinavian
speaking English in English, I have not yet heard a particularly good French
one though my experience is quite limited and I have no idea about Spanish.
There are usually options when setting up a screen reader for some aspects
like a choice to speak or spell unusual letter combinations. In the first
case if the programme detects an unusual letter combination it will apply
phonetic rules and attempt to pronounce the word. In the second case it will
simply spell it out. This often helps in things like those damn acronyms all
over the place.
Most, probably all screen readers also have an amendable dictionary of some
length. This offers the user the opportunity to alter pronunciations. I have
not used this feature a lot simply because I come to learn the peculiar
accent and simply accommodate it but many do prefer to create dictionary
entries. What happens there is you type in the word as it appears then type
in a phonetic equivalent which comes close to what you want to hear. You
could of course make substantial alterations, changing for example every
occurrence of a written word for a different pronunciation, like John to
toilet. This may be desirable if you prefer to receive "Dear Toilet" letters
over the other type <grin>
There are usually several other options, turning off or on the speaking of
punctuation and various levels of punctuation, capitalization, pauses on
punctuation, sometimes there is some control over inflection too, that is,
does the pitch rise at the end of a sentence terminated with a question mark
<?>, that sort of thing and how much and pauses after sentence terminated
punctuation. It is possible to upload some characteristics to some of the
external hardware synthesizers, again I have never had occasion to do this.
In the Windows environment now there are a number of software synthesizers
now available which use the sound card and audio characteristics available
on most Pentium based machines. These are generally quite a bit cheaper and
usually work quite satisfactorily, I prefer an external device but the
software ones are getting pretty damn good. To the best of my knowledge
there aren't any available under DOS and it is unlikely that we will see
anything really good there due to memory requirements and true multi-tasking
requirements for good software synthesizer response and performance.
Hope this is of some value to you.
Dale Leavens, Cochrane Ontario
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home of the Polar Bear Express!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nettamer List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Nettamer List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 11:53 AM
Subject: Do screen readers stumble badly over misspelled words?
Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 11:02:08 -0500
From: "Samuel W. Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Do screen readers stumble badly over misspelled words?
Hello:
I have a couple of question for all you folks who use screen readers.
First question:
(1.) Do screen readers stumble badly over misspelled words?
I would suppose that they would, but I have never used a screen
reader myself. Maybe some screen readers have some kind of
program routine designed into them to try to figure out the word
that was attempted to have been written in the text. I don't
know. Maybe when a screen reader encounters a spelling that is
not found in its dictionary it will just read out the spelling of
the word. In that case the operator could most usually figure
out the word that the text was trying to say. A screen reader
program could be designed for sounding out the word phonetically,
but this would not work very well with the English language.
In the case of English words there are thousands of exceptions
to the rules of pronunciation. In the case of the Spanish language
all of the words are always pronounced invariably according to the
rules of pronunciation. Maybe the screen readers designed for
Spanish speaking people are programmed to work by sounding out the
words phonetically. This would theoretically work in the case of
the Spanish language.
Next question:
(2.) Do screen readers have problems at understanding abbreviated
and stylized spellings?
Many people use abbreviated spellings and stylized spellings for
words and expressions. A typical example is the phrase "whazzup?".
Do screen readers stumble on the expression "whazzup?" ?
Sam Heywood
-- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list,
send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the single word
Unsubscribe
as the subject.
You MUST use the same address with which you subscribed!
********************************************************
********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list,
send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the single word
Unsubscribe
as the subject.
You MUST use the same address with which you subscribed!
********************************************************
