WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Lang attribute and "old" latin

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Apr 25, 2008 2:00AM

John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program wrote:
> As far as I know, current screen reading technology only supports a limited
> number of languages.

[snip]

> The question is, is there any real advantage gained by adding this
> information (lang="lat") to the content?

Even if there were no speech synthesis available for a language, screen
readers like JAWS can announce language changes and users can associate
particular voice configurations with particular languages.

As it happens, it looks like Classical Latin is among the MBROLA voices:

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html

It is therefore (at least theoretically) usable with at least some
screen readers and text-to-speech software, e.g. NVDA, FreeTTS (used by
FireVox), and Emacspeak:

http://www.nvda.fr/spip.php?article14

http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/mbrola/

http://web.mit.edu/ATIC/src/emacspeak-9.0/mbrola

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis