- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 02:52:12 +0200
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Julian (I think) asked about this a while ago. Some things that came out are that there are versions of HAL (a screen reader from the British company dolphin) in Arabic and Catalan, Marc Walraven from ascii.be told me that there is a chinese screen reader, there is a version of mbrola (free text to speech engine that works with several of the free linux screen readers) in arabic, there is text to speech software for hebrew (but the one that does a reasonable job is apparently hideously expensive). Home Page Reader started life as a project by IBM developers in Japan, and "major european languages" are reasonably well provided with screen readers at least for windows and linux. I should test out the speech system on my macintosh for other languages, if Kynn Bartlett hasn't done this in his maccessibility blog (end plug <grin/>). Indic languages are pretty much a mystery to me unfortunately, and I don't know what the situation is for South East Asia (although I think their written forms are pretty close to the audio version, so it should be a lot easier than an english text-to-speech conversion). Telecom companies are probably good places to ask about this, too. If I get some time I'll chase up links, but I am pretty preoccupied at the moment :( cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile Fundación Sidar charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org
Received on Thursday, 24 July 2003 20:52:54 UTC