Re: Screen reader support for languages other thank English

> 
> 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  

What the industry means by screen reader these days is a an MSAA/HTML
document object model reader, like JAWS.  That seems to be the standard
by which web authors decide if they are minimally legally compliant.
How many open source MSAA/DOM based tools are there?

> 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.

Most languages that have only recently been given an alphabet base
orthography have fairly simple spelling rules, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that text to speech is easy as spelling rules generally
oversimplify.  They tend to merge similar phonemes into a single one
where there is no resulting ambiguity, and they don't, normally, fully
account for sandhi, the changes in sounds when two phonemes are adjacent
to each other (often a change from voiced to unvoiced or vv).

Received on Tuesday, 16 August 2005 19:23:37 UTC