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Re: Title Attribute speaking Right Language in Wrong accent, but the rest of the page is fine

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Oct 29, 2017 2:37AM

I do echo the response of those who would like to see screen readers do better with lang attributes. I have found that JAWS does not drill through various nested tags to look for lang attributes.

For example, I had various sites with one link pointing to English, Spanish and Chinese content. It would be redundant to include multiple links with the same URL on the page. JAWS was only reading the first span inside the link label and defaulting to English.

As I tried to make sense out of it, I noticed that JAWS was using the <a> lang attribute and applying it to all of the spans within the link label. It completely disregarded the spans that had the Spanish and Chinese. It read their content using English synthesizers.

While that was proper HTML coding and I couldn't disagree with the developers, I was unable to get the right content spoken with the right synthesizer to our customers.

Another thing I noticed about JAWS 18 was the claim that it now supports Arabic. That was a lie. I went to Arabic web sites and to my surprise, JAWS was still reading the content as a string of Arabic letters. There was no way to make out what it was saying.

I wanted to mention this on here for those who might be coding something in Arabic. Do not expect JAWS to switch its synthesizer to an Arabic one that can assemble the letters and read from right to left. In fact, it would read the letters from left to right, which is wrong and makes no sense to the end user.

VFO definitely needs to make some improvements with the way JAWS parses languages. There is a ton of problems in that area that are not being addressed. I cannot foresee a reason why a small program like VoiceOver on iOS can read Arabic quite well and would switch smoothly between languages, when a huge application like JAWS cannot. I won't buy it either that it is a Windows limitation. It is simply lack of interest, which has been bothering me for many years with JAWS. This is becoming more of a problem now that the web is imposing this restriction on JAWS and VFO is careless about it.

If I sound a bit harsh, that's because VFO or FS have obtained many suggestions from me as a user. All of those suggestions were never taken in consideration when it came to altering synthesizers properly and supporting Arabic as well.