Re: accessibility- assisting speach readers with foreign place names

Unfortunately the way in which a screen reader pronounces a foreign word or place name will be
dependent on the screen readers dictionary file.  This file is used to tell the screen reader how to
pronounce words or phrases.  If support for the given language in which the word is written is not
integrated into the screen reader software,  you could wind up with mangled pronunciations.  I can
send the jaws dictionary file to anyone off list who wants to see how it works.  In some cases the
replacement word has to be a gross misspelling of the original word in order to arrive at a correct
pronunciation.
----- Original Message -----
From: "China Net" <szcam(at)pub.sz.jsinfo.net>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2001 10:30 AM
Subject: accessibility- assisting speach readers with foreign place names


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

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA