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Re: Language Switching

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From: Jonathan Cohn
Date: Mar 29, 2021 5:40AM

OK, the speech rotor in MacOS Catalina and higher is a bit difficult to type.
Use. if your VO key is caps lock then use caps lock with shift and command with your left hand. Then with your right hand use the left or right arrow key until you hear "Voice followed by a voice name" . At this point use the Up arrow key until you hear automatically switch based on language.

Best wishes,
You might want to also open VOiceOver utility and adjust the languages synthesizers that are available. Generally only "compact" versions of these are installed by default. There is a plus sign (I believe VoiceOver says add a language) on the voices page by default there is only one language in the Voices table. Then you can click on the language name and go to the bottom of the list. to customize. This will list all 170 synthesizers voices that are available.


Jonathan Cohn



> On Mar 25, 2021, at 18:22, Joe Humbert (A11y) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> I just tested with VoiceOver on MacOS v10.15.7 and it switches automatically.
>
> Test page (just created): https://a11yeval.com/a11y/multi-lang.html
>
> Thankx,
> Joe Humbert, CPWA
> Accessibility Champion
> Android & iOS Accessibility Novice
> Twitter: @joehumbert
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
> Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 5:57 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Language Switching
>
> Are you asking how to enable a screen reader to automatically change voices when it encounters a lang attribute that is different from the page default, and specifically how to do that with VoiceOver on the Mac?
>
> For me, JAWS and VoiceOver/iOS automatically switch. I have never been able to get NVDA to do it. I don't have my Mac anymore so I can't comment on that, which I know is your question specifically.
>
> I can manually switch languages on VoiceOver/iOS by using the rotor but only if I have multiple languages set in VoiceOver. Go into Accessibility settings > VoiceOver > Speech and add a new language to the rotor languages at the bottom. This will automatically add a "Language" option to your rotor. In fact, you can't remove the rotor setting. (You can confirm in Accessibility settings > VoiceOver > Rotor and notice the Language option is checked and dimmed/disabled. You can't uncheck it.)
>
> I've used the rotor on the Mac before but can't remember if there's a language option.
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