Re: Microsoft Talks Raising the Bar on Accessibility
NVDA and VoiceOver both have voice rotors like Window-Eyes and support Automatic Language switching. On 7/8/2019 2:56 AM, David via Talk wrote: Please, let me give you all a tiny example of what still needs attention, before a screen reader like Narrator will become productive. And yes it seems a tiny thing to many, but it still has a lot of impact. And it is but one of the many things to be considered. For most people living in the USA, or in places that are mainly English-speaking, this might not even have been an issue. Same goes, if you are living anywhere else, and only know one language. But for many people the everyday activity looks a bit more challenging. Those who live in Canada, Non-English European countries, and most parts of Africa, will know what I am talking. In Canada for one, you have to deal with information both in English and French. Though you might have taken the shortcut and learned to deal with your English synthesizer attempting to read French words, you will agree it is not optimal. And promise you, try let it read some Islandic, Swedish or Greek - and you will likely be lost. These languages often have National characters, that are not part of the English alphabet. Here I am going to commend Eloquence for at least *trying* to pronounce something that will come close enough. But try with any of the other synths on the main market, and you will find them typically skip those charactres in the text. Imagine your English screen being read out to you - with all the letters of A, G and K not being spoken. How productive would that be? So, for a multi-lingual user, the way to go, is to have two or more synthesizers installed. Each handling one of the languages you are working with. It won't be anything rare, for users living outside the English world, to have to switch between languages, numerous times a day. Even several times an hour. You are checking something on the net, that is in English. You get a message from your mom, which is in your locale language. Then you need get in touch with someone in another country, like here on the list, and again you are dealing with English. And you simply gotta pay that phone bill today, and your banking site is back in your native language. Oh, wait, you even have a friend who speaks a third language, and you sure want to drop her a nice word of encouragement. One African person I talked to, told me that they knew to speak no less than seven different languages. Now, you can easily - and cheaply enough - get hold of electronic voices for most main languages today. Long as they are SAPI voices, they will tie in with your screen reader, without too much of problems. That is, on Windows. Thing is, how easy is it to swap between the different voices? The last decade it has been a swift thing in WinEyes, since you can use the VoiceRotor app, which became part of the standard installation of the screen reader. Using this app, all you need is pressing a hotkey, wait for a second while the next voice is being activated, and you are good to go. NVDA, does lack such a hotkey. To perform a swap of synthesizer - will require you to go in and out of at least one, and sometimes two different menus. Android has got quite a number of languages to choose from. And if you don't want to stick with Google's voice for your native tongue, you simply just buy another voice, and get it installed. Still, you cannot easily swap between them. In and out of menus, requiring yu to perform several gestures for each swapping. now imagine you are checking the email this morning, and there are 25 new messages from you. First three are in one language, then comes 2 in another, yet 4 more in the first, still 1 more in the other - and so forth. If each change of language will take you 10 seconds, how long will it take to check your mail? I'd let you do your own time math. Smiles. See, for most multi-lingual users this is the scenario of their daily computer activity. And what do you think your employer is telling you, if you have to spend half an hour each working-day, just in swapping synthesizers? Something about productivity, my guess would be. A similar thing would be told, comes to the Braille output. Like you in English have Grade-two Braille, so do other languages. But since the words are different, one language from the other, and the Grade-two is meant to minimize the space requirement and increase the readability, the Grade-two of another language will have to be quite differing from the one you know in English. In English, you have one word, consisting of only the letter A. That's why that letter by itself cannot mean any abbriviation. But in Scandinavian languages for instance, there are no words made up of only that one letter. So, in Grade-two of those languages, an A on its own, will be the abbriviation of the word "at". Again, in English you have the combination TH, occuring several times even in one and same phrase. It is of high value to you, to
Re: Microsoft Talks Raising the Bar on Accessibility
Please, let me give you all a tiny example of what still needs attention, before a screen reader like Narrator will become productive. And yes it seems a tiny thing to many, but it still has a lot of impact. And it is but one of the many things to be considered. For most people living in the USA, or in places that are mainly English-speaking, this might not even have been an issue. Same goes, if you are living anywhere else, and only know one language. But for many people the everyday activity looks a bit more challenging. Those who live in Canada, Non-English European countries, and most parts of Africa, will know what I am talking. In Canada for one, you have to deal with information both in English and French. Though you might have taken the shortcut and learned to deal with your English synthesizer attempting to read French words, you will agree it is not optimal. And promise you, try let it read some Islandic, Swedish or Greek - and you will likely be lost. These languages often have National characters, that are not part of the English alphabet. Here I am going to commend Eloquence for at least *trying* to pronounce something that will come close enough. But try with any of the other synths on the main market, and you will find them typically skip those charactres in the text. Imagine your English screen being read out to you - with all the letters of A, G and K not being spoken. How productive would that be? So, for a multi-lingual user, the way to go, is to have two or more synthesizers installed. Each handling one of the languages you are working with. It won't be anything rare, for users living outside the English world, to have to switch between languages, numerous times a day. Even several times an hour. You are checking something on the net, that is in English. You get a message from your mom, which is in your locale language. Then you need get in touch with someone in another country, like here on the list, and again you are dealing with English. And you simply gotta pay that phone bill today, and your banking site is back in your native language. Oh, wait, you even have a friend who speaks a third language, and you sure want to drop her a nice word of encouragement. One African person I talked to, told me that they knew to speak no less than seven different languages. Now, you can easily - and cheaply enough - get hold of electronic voices for most main languages today. Long as they are SAPI voices, they will tie in with your screen reader, without too much of problems. That is, on Windows. Thing is, how easy is it to swap between the different voices? The last decade it has been a swift thing in WinEyes, since you can use the VoiceRotor app, which became part of the standard installation of the screen reader. Using this app, all you need is pressing a hotkey, wait for a second while the next voice is being activated, and you are good to go. NVDA, does lack such a hotkey. To perform a swap of synthesizer - will require you to go in and out of at least one, and sometimes two different menus. Android has got quite a number of languages to choose from. And if you don't want to stick with Google's voice for your native tongue, you simply just buy another voice, and get it installed. Still, you cannot easily swap between them. In and out of menus, requiring yu to perform several gestures for each swapping. now imagine you are checking the email this morning, and there are 25 new messages from you. First three are in one language, then comes 2 in another, yet 4 more in the first, still 1 more in the other - and so forth. If each change of language will take you 10 seconds, how long will it take to check your mail? I'd let you do your own time math. Smiles. See, for most multi-lingual users this is the scenario of their daily computer activity. And what do you think your employer is telling you, if you have to spend half an hour each working-day, just in swapping synthesizers? Something about productivity, my guess would be. A similar thing would be told, comes to the Braille output. Like you in English have Grade-two Braille, so do other languages. But since the words are different, one language from the other, and the Grade-two is meant to minimize the space requirement and increase the readability, the Grade-two of another language will have to be quite differing from the one you know in English. In English, you have one word, consisting of only the letter A. That's why that letter by itself cannot mean any abbriviation. But in Scandinavian languages for instance, there are no words made up of only that one letter. So, in Grade-two of those languages, an A on its own, will be the abbriviation of the word "at". Again, in English you have the combination TH, occuring several times even in one and same phrase. It is of high value to you, to shorten that down to one character. In several European languages, that TH combination
