Screen Reader Supported Languages

I did some searching on the web to find the supported languages for some 
of the screen readers.

Dolphin 17
Home Page Reader 13
JAWS 17
WindowEyes 9

Further details are below.

Home Page Reader
I got the following information from the IBM HPR page[1]
<quote>
Multi language support:         United States and United Kingdom English, 
Brazilian Portuguese, French, Finnish, German, Italian and Spanish
</quote>
I got more details from the developer.  The HPR 3.04 package is currently 
shipped in the following languages: U.S. English, Spanish, German, 
Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Thai. Japanese HPR 3.04 is 
currently under development. In addition to the language of the package, 
HPR 3.04 ships U.S. English, U.K. English, Spanish, German, Italian, 
Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Finnish IBM TTS engines in all language 
versions of HPR to provide TTS language switching based on the Web page 
language (using the lang attribute or an HPR automatic language detection 
algorithm based on a simple word list for each supported language). 

HPR 3.02 was also available in Korean, and HPR 2.5 was available in 
Simplified and Traditional Chinese. 


JAWS

I found the following quotes on the Freedom Scientific JAWS product info 
site[2], although it doesn't specify a version:
<quote>
JAWS installs with an enhanced, multi-lingual software speech synthesizer, 
“Eloquence for JAWS.” Languages include: American English, British 
English, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, French 
Canadian, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Finnish. 

JAWS has been translated into 17 languages worldwide. 
</quote>

If you count the languages in the list above there are 10.   
There is a Russian JAWS User group and their home page[3] contains a 
heading "Screen reader JAWS for Windows Russian" so I assume that is one 
of the languages. 
On the Jaws European Site [4]  I found a link to Download Jaws 5.1 
Netherlands[5]
I also found a reference to Arabic JAWS, Chinese JAWS, and JAWS for 
Windows (in Japanese) in the distributor pages.

That brings the total up to 15. Does anyone know what the other languages 
are?


WindowEyes

From the WindowEyes web site [6]
<quote>
Through the use of software speech, Window-Eyes offers the following voice 
support: 
US English Eloquence 5.0 
UK English Eloquence 5.0 
Castilian Spanish Eloquence 5.0 
Mexican Spanish Eloquence 5.0 
French Eloquence 5.0 
Canadian French Eloquence 5.0 
German Eloquence 5.0 
Italian Eloquence 5.0 
Portuguese Eloquence 5.0 
US English Microsoft 

Please note that the ScanSoft RealSpeak voices are only available under 
Windows 2000/XP/2003. For information on localized copies of Window-Eyes, 
please contact our sales department at 260-489-3671 
</quote>

That gives 9 and perhaps other localized versions of WindowEyes. 

HAL Screen Reader 

From the HAL site [7]:
<quote>
Choice of Orpheus languages, including: 
English (UK and USA), Cantonese, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, 
German, Greek, Italian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish 
(Latin and Castilian) and Swedish. New languages are being added all the 
time. 
</quote>

Which totals 17 for HAL. 

[1] http://www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr2.html#order

[2] http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jawsinfo.asp

[3]http://subscribe.ru/catalog/comp.soft.others.jfwrus 
[4] http://www.freedomsci.de/

[5] http://www.freedomsci.de/serv01nld.htm

[6] http://www.gwmicro.com/products/

[7] http://www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/hal.htm



Becky Gibson
Web Accessibility Architect
                                                       
IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
5 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com

Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 20:07:51 UTC