RE: what languages can screen readers read in?

Charles,
While you are looking around, I am also trying to find out what screenreader
support there may be for three other languages- Chinese, Vietnamese and
Tagalog.  If anyone on this list knows, please pass it on.

Thanks in advance,
Cynthia Waddell

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International Center for Disability Resources
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-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 2:31 PM
To: Scarlett Julian (ED)
Cc: 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'
Subject: Re: what languages can screen readers read in?



I believe there is an arabic screen reader available, released about a
year ago. (Maybe it is only a text to speech engine, but they can be
hooked up to various linux-based screen readers and possibly to windows
ones as well).

There's a whole audio-based operating system in brazilian portuguese,
there are definitely screen readers able to read "major european
languages" (although I have heard finns laughing about the sound of
things they use, I have also seen there a system that auto-detected for
finnish or english and changed languages on the fly).

I'd be surprised to find any definitive information on a monolingual
list such as this one. Any results you do come up with would be useful
though, and I suspect interesting to a number of people.

Certainly there are japanese screenreaders. To find out about things
like Urdu and Somali you might have to go beyond the subscribers of
this list (do you know a Somali who might be interested in researching
this a bit?).

I'll ask around, too. But can't hold out many promises.

cheers

Charles

On Monday, Jun 23, 2003, at 12:22 Europe/Zurich, Scarlett Julian (ED)
wrote:

> I've had a nosey in the archives but can't find a definitive answer. I
> know that JAWS and HAL can read in a number of languages but they seem
> to be Euro-centric. Does anyone know if there is support for Asian
> languages. I want to put some pages up in the community languages of
> our city (Somali, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Bengali) and want to put
> them up as text but I'm wondering whether a screen reader will be able
> to read the text out in a language that the user can understand.
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Monday, 23 June 2003 18:44:41 UTC