Hello Andrew, David is correct; this is a bug in the Greek localization that was not present in iOS 5.1, and needs to be reported to Apple's accessibility team. Your comparison with the experience of using Russian is apt here, because that's another instance where the characters are not Latin, but the Cyrillic characters are pronounced correctly and not spelled out when you select that language for inclusion in the language rotor. I usually also add whatever voice is selected as the default voice separately to my language rotor. The distinction between selecting default language (which might be U,S, English), and the explicit language in the language rotor is that under "default language" VoiceOver tries to automatically identify and set the languages based on source attributes. So on a web page, a post coming from a German user, even writing in English, might trigger a switch to the German voice under the default voice setting. There are limits to this: a web page with mixed Chinese characters and English will not read any of the characters with a default English voice, while switching to a Mandarin voice will read both Chinese characters and English text, although with the pronunciation pattern of the Chinese voice.
My guess is that Greek is affected, as distinct from other languages, because Greek letters are commonly used symbols in mathematics and science, or even in the naming of fraternities. So as part of developing VoiceOver support of textbooks in many languages, including the pronunciation of these letters has to be tackled. There are a couple of related posts from the past week that I'll give links for from the list Mail Archives: • Re: iOS 6.1 and accessibility from Applevis http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone%40googlegroups.com/msg28935.html This was a response to an iOS 6.1 "bug" identification about VoiceOver sometimes using voices for other languages when the default U.S. English voice was selected in the language rotor as opposed to a (non- default) British or Australian English voice. • spelling in Greek with voice over. http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg80476.html This recent post to the macvisionaries list describes the counterpart behavior to your comment about Greek in iOS for Mac OS X mountain lion and checking word spelling. It's like navigating a word by character and instead of hearing a word like "apple" simply spelled out, you heard VoiceOver say, "small English letter a, small English letter p, etc." only this happens when Greek is used. This is another Greek localization problem, because the behavior didn't get fixed when the poster created a second account with Greek as the default language, as opposed to just changing his language and voice to Greek under an account that was set up in English. HTH. Remember that if you are viewing Mail Archive posts on the web browser on your computer, you can simply use the access key shortcuts to read down and up the thread. On a Mac with VoiceOver in Safari this is Control-n for the next post in a thread, and Control-p for the previous post. For Internet Explorer under Windows, use Alt-n and Alt- p. For Firefox on Linux and Windows, I think this is Alt-Shift-n and Alt-Shift-p, and you can substitute the appropriate access key prefix for your other browser/operating system combination. Cheers, Esther On Feb 3, 12:35 am, David Chittenden <[email protected]> wrote: > Sounds like something to report to Apple. I suggest sending an email to > [email protected] reporting the problem. > > David Chittenden, MSc, MRCAA > Email: [email protected] > Mobile:+64 21 2288 288 > Sent from my iPhone > > On 03/02/2013, at 23:13, Andrew Lamanche <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > Dear Listers, > > > In iOS 6.0, one could not use the Greek voice as it would only spell the > > Greek text rather than read it as normal. In iOS 6.1, this behaviour > > appeared to be the same, much to my dispair. However, I've played with it a > > little more and I discover that if I make the Greek voice my default voice > > in "settings" / "international", then I can read Greek text as one should. > > The problem is however, that having made Greek the default voice, all the > > icons change to the Greek localisation as well. The Greek voice can read > > English but with a degree of distortion which makes it very tiresome. > > Therefore, in english applications, Greek voice will read the English icons > > and text but in a ditroted somewhat distorted way. It is a solution for me > > but not very satisfactory. > > > I don't understand why it is that when I choose Greek using the rotor with > > English being the default, then the Greek doesn't work properly, but when I > > make it the default voice, then it does. > > > Has anyone else noticed this with other languages? It seems to me that it > > is a bug since no other voice behaves in this fashion. Even when you go to > > the languages options and flick through the list of all available > > languages, all languages are spoken by their full name, i.e., Francé, but > > when you land on Greek it says, epsilon, lambda lambda iota, nika, rather > > then ellinika which is a full name. So it spells part of the name and part > > pronounces it. > > > Feel free to write of list, if you wish with your experiences, comments. > > It's frustrating to be able to choose French let's say when I need it, or > > Russian, and read a piece of text easily, and not to be able to switch > > through language rotor option into Greek to let's say browse a website in > > Greek or read an ej-mail from a Greek friend. > > > Best wishes > > > Andrew > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" > > Google Group. > > To search the VIPhone public archive, > > visithttp://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected]. > > For more options, visit this group > > athttp://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. > > --- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "VIPhone" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > > email to [email protected]. > > For more options, visithttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
