Re: word comprhension

14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate... [priority 1]

Of course at some point speech technology needs to learn how to deal with
common but new terms in a language. Homepage is one that I would expect to
work - especially in a product whose name includes the term. But Text to
Speech is an inexact science - even people who are experts cannot agree to
pronounce words the same way. Just ask a well-trained and very literate
American chemist what the eleme whose symbol is Al is called - they tell you
about a thing called "aluminum". But they are in fact referring to what any
Australian voice recogniser would expect to hear as al-(y)a-min-(i)-yum.

The problem is funnier (after people get over the inconvenience of learning
about it) when a screen reader uses a finnish or swedish synthesiser but
provides its cues and prompts in english...

cheers

Chaalls

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002 Steven.Faulkner@visionaustralia.org.au wrote:

  I have noticed that when using a screen reading browser such as IBM
  homepage reader when words are joined together for example "homepage"
  the words "home" and "page" are not recognised, as a consequence the joined
  words become incomprehensible to the screenreading software. I haven't
  found any references to this within the gudielines. have i missed them?


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 19:30:43 UTC