multi-lingual assistive technology

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