- From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 13:35:50 +0200
- To: "Rebecca Cox" <rebecca@signify.co.nz>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 05:22:17 +0200, Rebecca Cox <rebecca@signify.co.nz> wrote: > Does anyone know what sort of support there is for languages other than > English, using screen readers? > > I'm in New Zealand and am interested in whether there's any support for > Māori - not sure this list is the best place to be asking about this! (yes, Maori is a relatively old code, since it is an offical language in a country). You may want to look at open source systems based on MBROLA / festival or similar if you want a Māori screen reader - I don't know if anyone has done the work but as I understand it Māori is written in a realtively phonetic manner, so shouldn't be all that difficult to work with for a voice developer. There is a voice group at W3C, and a lot of the people in that are working in the area of speech synthesis. But I don't know in particular if there is anything currently available - presumably New Zealand and perhaps Hawaii would be the places to look around... Windows has a whole lot of support for languages it handles well, but there are other screen readers for languages like japanese, arabic and hebrew that are little-known where people don't speak those languages much. (Those three also have, in varying degrees, some interesting complexities). Finally, even where a system is available in multiple languages the versions may not be synchronised - for example you can use some screen reader version 27 in english, which includes the version 7 spanish engine, or you can get version 7 in spanish that incorporates the advanced english speech rules, or perhaps it is just sold as version 7 in spanish with the old version 7 english engine too... cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile chaals@opera.com hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk Here's one we prepared earlier: http://www.opera.com/download
Received on Monday, 15 August 2005 11:37:01 UTC