Hi Yuma, According to the Multilingual Mac's summary of Snow Leopard, VoiceOver is able to handle all 18 system languages, but only English is provided by Apple. See:
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/ under the entry for "OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): New Language Features" item number 6. Historically, there was an early version of Japanese that was offered through Assistiveware's Visiovoice under Tiger (OS X version 10.4). Visiovoice gave Tiger users who wanted the kind of language/voice support that you have in Leopard (for example, the ability to bring up your system speaking in French), an alternative to the English-only VoiceOver. You purchased the voices from Acapela -- the same Infovox iVox voices you are using now under Leopard/Snow Leopard with VoiceOver. For Japanese, which came in a Visiovoice 1.1 release, the voice used was by DTalker for Mac OS X. That web site for the DTalker 3.0 Japanese voices is in Japanese: http://www.createsystem.co.jp/dtalkerMacOSX.html but you can try running it through the Google Translate pages to get something that VoiceOver will read. As of Leopard, you shouldn't need to get Visiovoice if you are using VoiceOver, although Visiovoice does offer other features like additional cursor support reading options for low vision users, and easy switching between different language voices, etc. Here's a link to my post from last year in the archives about the status of oriental voices for the Mac that discusses a few other related issues: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss540macvisionaries.com/msg45495.html (Oriental voices for the Mac, VoiceOver, and language learning) The potential VoiceOver accessibility issue of switching to a non- Roman input keyboard is that, if you can't switch back to a Roman letter based input keyboard with a simple keyboard shortcut, your keyboard shortcut inputs won't be understood by VoiceOver. I think that you're best off using TextEdit, which can speak the non-English characters as you type or input them even when no other app will announce these characters. (This works even if you don't have the voice for that language -- it's how I figure out what accents may be present on foreign language input keyboards even though I don't have voices for that language). Even if you have a voice for a language with non-Roman character inputs (like Greek or Russian), you may find it easier to send what you're reading on a web page to TextEdit, because you'll have better control of the navigation through the text. You can change the voice to the other language, but still maintained keyboard control in VoiceOver with your familiar keyboard. This may not be an issue with Japanese, but it's certainly an issue for Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. For Japanese, you could navigate to the Text Input menu on the status menu bar (VO-M twice or Control-F8, then arrow over to Text Input) and press "O" to go to the "Open International Menu" item in the menu. On the Input Menu tab of the International menu, navigate to the table, interact, and check the box for "Japanese Kana Palette" with VO-Space on the second row of the table, then close the window with Command-W. Now, if you open a window in TextEdit, you can navigate to the Text Input Menu on the menu bar and press "S" to go to the "Show Japanese Kana Palette" menu option. Since this is window may be labeled with non-Roman characters. VoiceOver won't announce it when you bring up Window Chooser menu (VO-F2 twice), but you can select it by arrowing down to the silent option. If you navigate the Japanese Kana Palette with VO-arrow keys, you'll hear "Hiragana letter a", "Katakana letter a", "A" for the three tabs. If you navigate to the tabs you'll hear each letter announced and can select it with VO-Space. There are also keys for delete, space, etc. When you want to close the Japanese Kana Palette window, use your VO-arrow keys to navigate to the close button and press it with VO-Space, or else, navigate back to the Text Input Menu on the menu bar and press "H" or arrow down to "Hide Japanese Kana Palette" in the menu. You have to close or hide the palette menu this way, because the input window of TextEdit is the window that would get closed if you used Command-W since it has focus for entry. The palette should let you compose letters and switch to English input with the third tab, too. It can be used to input into Mail, too, but my experience with non-Roman characters is that VoiceOver won't read these back to you unless you're in TextEdit, so I can copy and paste the content between TextEdit and Mail, but the content won't get announced in Mail if I'm using an English language localization. (I haven't tried changing my account over to Russian -- not sure I could maintain control of VoiceOver or type with any proficiency on a Russian input keyboard). I don't speak Japanese, so my ability to experiment with this (especially without a voice for the language) is limited. Also, it might be that Snow Leopard has additional features. It appears to have added back the ability (that was in Tiger) to open windows with different input language keyboards in the same app. HTH. Write back if you have questions. Cheers, Esther william lomas wrote: > > there is no japanese chinise, or other similar voice for the mac, > though. On the IPhone there is japanese but not with the mac os x > > Yuma Antoine Decaux wrote: > >> >> Hi list, >> >> I've decided that i wanted to start using my fluency in jaanese to >> communicate with, well, japanese individuals :) >> >> Can anyone give me some pointers on the use of japanese, as it seems >> relatively difficult? Is it just a matter of having the local >> setttings installed on the system, then acquiring the voice, or is >> there other factors i need to consider? >> >> thanks for some clarification, and best >> >> Yuma >> >>> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
