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Re: Multilingual Website Accessibility: How to make screen readers play prerecorded audio instead of the text?

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 20, 2013 2:51PM

Hi

You will have to set up some sort of a standardized link or button,
ideally on top of the page to be read, with a text in either English,
or the closes language (at least the language you expect the user to
be using while browsing) that says
"no text-to-speech engine exists for the language on this place as far
as we know, please click this button to listen to a pre-recorded sound
file with the contents of this page"
... of course this would be an awfully long label text for a button,
but this is the general idea I would look into.
Also you can check with the eSpeak TTS engine, with iVona and the
other major TTS providers and perhaps have a page with the list of
languages these manufacturers support in one place, though it would
take a little bit of work to get it together.
eSpeak is not the highest quality, but it is free, open, remarkably
good really and supports the most languages, well over 30.
Good luck with this challenging project.
-B

On 5/20/13, Mats Blakstad < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> I work on a multilingual website that will contain many languages that
> are not normally written, and I wonder if there are any ways to get
> this working for people using screen readers? All text will get a
> lang-attribute, but several of the languages will not exist for screen
> reading.
>
> E.g: one of the translators in the project, that is using a screen
> reader translated the project into his native language Kambaata (a
> language from Ethiopia), so we started to discuss how it works for
> him; he said that when he get a text in Kambaata he will simply make
> the screen reader try to read it like an English text and then
> interpret it.
>
> As it is not normal to write Kambaata the text can even be hard to
> read for someone that don't need a screen reader, so we're going to
> add prerecorded sound files to the website, to help native Kambaata
> speakers read the text: And I wonder if it is possible to get this
> communicated to the screen reader so it will use our prerecorded sound
> files instead of trying to read the text itself?
> > > >