E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)

From: Mats Blakstad
Date: Mon, May 20 2013 8:23AM
Subject: Multilingual Website Accessibility: How to make screen readers play prerecorded audio instead of the text?
No previous message | Next message →

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?

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Mon, May 20 2013 2:51PM
Subject: Re: Multilingual Website Accessibility: How to make screen readers play prerecorded audio instead of the text?
← Previous message | Next message →

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 ADDRESS 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?
> > > >

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Mon, May 20 2013 4:23PM
Subject: Re: Multilingual Website Accessibility: How to make screen readers play prerecorded audio instead of the text?
← Previous message | No next message

For others, this sounds like a duplicate of:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16629828/how-can-i-replace-the-screen-reader-audio-with-a-prerecorded-audio-file/

My answer there touches on what Birkir mentioned.

--
Ryan E. Benson


On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:

> 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 ADDRESS 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?
> > > > > > > >
> > > >