RE: Screen Reader Supported Languages

Notice that the number of languages supported by a particular TTS engine not
always corresponds with the number of languages to which the application
that uses it has been localized in. For example, you can have an English
only application UI (all GUI and spoken strings are in English) that uses
one or more multilingual TTS engines.
 
Regards,
 
--Andres.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Becky_Gibson@notesdev.ibm.com
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2005 1:08 PM
To: WCAG
Subject: 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:  <mailto:gibsonb@us.ibm.com> gibsonb@us.ibm.com