- From: Lisa Seeman <seeman@netvision.net.il>
- Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 02:49:51 -0700
- To: gv@trace.wisc.edu, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
- Cc: judy@w3.org
- Message-id: <006501c25ef8$bec24be0$7200000a@patirsrv.patir.com>
MessageThis is the company that I reported about in my email entitled NAKDAN Note: they do not have a typical screen reader - the user has to copy and paste bits of the web site into their screen reader. The screen reader will then read the section to you or add vowels. It does not render content as "interactive" so it can not be used for surfing but for rendering specific sections of content. You must have partial vision to operate their screen reader. I spoke with them a month ago and they had no concrete plans to develop an interactive screen reader that could be used by people without vision. It is a good tool for some learning disabilities, but it is it is priced at about the average monthly salary. ( most people with learning disabilities earn less) The tool for author to put on a specific site, that reads the site to a user ($2950) also only helps users with vision and is not interactive. The summary of their , and other products is at http://ubaccess.com/hebrew-access.html I recommend that we coordinate when talking to these companies. It will give them a clearer idea of what they need to do to build a screen reader All the best, Lisa Seeman UnBounded Access Widen the World Web http://www.UBaccess.com -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Gregg Vanderheiden Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 10:15 PM To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org Subject: FW: Query about support for Hebrew FYI Gregg Dear Gregg, Further to Judy's reference to our company, Melingo, which is a subsidiary of Britannica Israel, and the leader in Natural Language Processing for semitic languages & computational linguistics, has developed a Hebrew TTS engine - Kolan. Kolan is able to read hebrew texts with or without vowels at an extremely high degree of accuracy (average accuracy is over 98%). The problem of hebrew is quite complex, and together with Arabic poses the greatest challenge for speech synthesis (as well as for many other applications such as data search & retrieval). Kolan overcomes the problems of morphological complexity, lack of vowels, and ambiguity, by incorporating a context sensitive morphological analyzer, together with a full inventory (a dictionary) of the hebrew language, as well as a soundex system that deals with names and non-hebrew words. Of course all this is transparent to the user of the applications that we have created for Kolan. As to applications, Kolan is incorporated into several, such as a screen reader for people with learning disabilities or impaired vision (sold for $826), or as a web site owner's tool that enables within minutes the creation of an accurate reading of the entire site, that can then be activated by the client (sold for $2950). Kolan is already incorporated also into telecom applications especially in the field of unified messaging. All of the above applications are already commercially available, and of course additional applications can be and are being developed. I would be happy to be of further assistance, should you so require. Leon Paull Product Manager Melingo Ltd Tel: +972-3-6070423, cell: +972-54-646201 Fax: +972-3-6070401 www.melingo.com www.ravmilim.co.il www.morfix.co.il Melingo is a subsidiary of Britannica.com Israel
Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 04:52:21 UTC