Hello Aman,
Anne has answered your question about available Braille tables for non-
Latin alphabets. I think that the tables Archie has made are the only
ones available -- there aren't any others that Apple has done. As far
as using VoiceOver with non-Latin alphabets on the Mac, the only
languages that I'm aware of that have been used this way are Russian
and Greek. The major difficulty is finding voices in the non-Latin
alphabets to work with VoiceOver. The Arabic voices from Infovox are
their newest additions, which is why I believe there isn't a standard
trial download along with all the others. (Russian,Greek, and Turkish
were added in the batch before that.) I don't know of any Chinese or
Hebrew voices for the Mac, although you may find some software
packages for language learning that provided limited text-to-speech
options within that software application. There is supposed to be a
Japanese DTalker voice that is now Snow Leopard ready. You'd have to
ask Yuma if she's made progress with ordering this. If you have an
iPhone or iPod Touch upgraded to iOS 4, you can set your language
rotor to Japanese, and get more details if you point your iPhone web
browser to:
http://www.createsystem.co.jp/dtalkerMacOSX.html
The main thing to keep in mind for VoiceOver on the Mac, is that you
want to be able to switch input language keyboards to some language
that supports Latin input characters. Otherwise, you could be in a
situation where you can't type VoiceOver commands and have them
recognized because the keyboard doesn't support it. Keyboard switching
shortcuts can be set up under System Preferences along with your
selection of other input language keyboards.
There really aren't other options that I know of, short of using the
iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (when it gets the language rotor support
under VoiceOver that was supposed to be present in user models, and is
present in all the models that are set up with the Apple distribution
discs in Apple Stores). At least Arabic has Infovox voices available
for the Mac. On the iPhone, the Infovox Arabic voices are offered as
in-app voice purchase options for Voxtrek (a GPS navigation app),
which added this feature relatively recently, but are not available in
apps like Translate Now (or Translate Pro), which incorporated all the
available Infovox voice options at the time of its release (so it
includes Greek, Russian, and Turkish, for example, but not Arabic).
I'm not aware of iPhone apps that will speak Hebrew. The Loquendo
group has a few other text to speech voices used on the iPhone for
languages like Galician and Catalan, but these are European
languages. They're supposed to have a Chinese voice, but I haven't
found it used on the iPhone. (In any case, these are voices that only
work within specific apps, although you can paste text into
translation apps to have them spoken.)
For languages like Chinese, you have some options on the iPhone or
iPod Touch if you use the language rotor feature of iOS 4, and there
are some free and accessible dictionary apps. You can read my recent
archived post on "Chinese Input with VoiceOver on the iPhone":
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg24706.html
Again on the iPhone or iPod Touch, if you have access to the U.S. or
Canadian App Store (and possibly the U.K. and other stores in the
future), you can try the Trippo VoiceMagix app that does voice
recognition (U.S. English accents for input, only) as well as text
translation, and offers spoken audio for some translated text (in
Chinese, Hindi, and other interesting languages with non-Latin
alphabets, but not Arabic in spoken version -- only text.) That
archive post discussion is in a recent archived post, "Trippo
VoiceMagix -- new speech recognition and translation app for iPhone on
sale for $6.99 in U.S. App Store":
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg23454.html
(You might want to read down the thread for some further discussion on
how this app compares with other language apps that can be used for
different functions. If you're on a Mac, the access key combination
is Control-N to go to the next post in the thread, and Control-P to go
to the previous post in a thread at the Mail Archive.)
Specifically for (Mandarin) Chinese and (Iraqi) Arabic, there are
translation apps by Jibbigo (Jibbigo Chinese English Speech
Translator and Jibbigo Iraqi English Speech Translator). These apps
are $25 each, and are supposed to do bi-directional speech recognition
and translation on your iPhone. (Most translation apps work via an
internet connection to a translation server.) I haven't tried these,
but I'm skeptical about the accuracy of voice recognition for Chinese
and Arabic, given the range of accents and the structure of these
languages. (You'll notice the app is specifically for Iraqi Arabic.)
I think these apps are quite interesting, but they really load the
processor of your iDevice, and I'm not sure how well this would work
with VoiceOver running on top of the difficulties of doing good speech
recognition. This app should be available internationally, unlike
Trippo VoiceMagix.
HTH.
Cheers,
Esther
On Jul 7, 2010, Anne Robertson wrote:
Hello Aman,
I can't answer your questions about voices, but you can get non-
Latin Braille by downloading multilingual Braille from the CeciMac
site. My husband, Archie, has made Braille tables for Arabic, Greek,
Hebrew and Russian.
You can download the package from:
<http://www.cecimac.org/CeciMacBraille.dmg>
I hope this helps somewhat.
Cheers,
Anne
On Jul 8, 2010, at 1:45 AM, Aman Singer wrote:
Hi, all.
Has there been any experience with non-Latin character sets and
voice over? I am particularly interested in Arabic, Hebrew, and
Chinese. How
is Voice Over with handling these alphabets and texts in these
languages, if
anyone knows? I have come across an Arabic voice, but for the other
languages have yet to see one. Are they available, does anyone
know? I would
try the Arabic voice myself, but there is no demo of it. Further,
how is
braille handled in these languages if anyone has experience?
Thanks as always for the assistance available here.
Aman
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