accessibility- assisting speach readers with foreign place names

by "China Net" <szcam(at)pub.sz.jsinfo.net>

 Date:  Mon, 28 May 2001 22:30:40 +0800
 To:  <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
  todo: View Thread, Original
Hi listers,
    Whilst updating one of my sites to take into account some of the
accessibility issues that have been recently been being discussed here.
(Should have done it first time but the site was done a long time ago and I
had not even thought about speech readers etc <slapping one's self on the
wrist />) I suddenly thought of the amount of times I was using the place
name SUZHOU. Ok read it out loud and I bet there are few of you who
pronounce it correctly (any of our Chinese speaking members can skip that
bit far too easy).

now for the question. For those of our browsers whom may happen upon a site
with strange place names or even unusual surnames and are using a text to
speech program is there any way to help the text to speech program with the
pronunciation or tell the program that the word is in a specific language
without the text being altered.

Any comments on this would be greatly appreciated and may give us all an
insight into the inner workings of some of the text to speech browsers and
programs available.

Regards
Mark Bolton
www.boltonmedia.com
www.cn-display.com High definition LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon)
Televisions and Projectors
www.asiabase.dk  Market Consulting for the Chinese market
www.global-indust.com  State-of-the-art outsourced components production and
quality management

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