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#blind

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The Programming Linguist

Do you use a screen reader and read arabic content with it? Have you ever wondered why Arabic tts literally always sucks, being either super unresponsive, or gets most things wrong all the time? I've been wanting to rant about this for ages!
Imagine if English dropped most vowels: "Th ct st n th mt" for "The cat sat on the mat" and expected you to just KNOW which vowels go where. That's basically what Arabic does all day every day! Arabic uses an abjad, not an alphabet. Basically, we mostly write consonants, and the vowels are just... assumed? Like, they are very important in speech but we don't really write them down except in very rare and special cases (children's books, religious texts, etc). No one writes them at all otherwise and that is very acceptable because the language is designed that way.
A proper Arabic tts needs to analyze the entire sentence, maybe even the whole paragraph because the exact same word could have different unwritten vowels depending on its location, which actually changes its form and meaning! But for screen readers, you want your tts to be fast and responsive. And you do that by skipping all of that semantic processing. Instead it's literally just half-assed guess work which is almost wrong all the time, so we end up hearing everything the wrong way and just cope with it.
It gets worse. What if we give the tts a single word to read (which is pretty common when you're more closely analyzing something). Let's apply that logic to English. Imagine you are the tts engine. You get presented with just 'st', with no surrounding context and have to figure out the vowels here. Is it Sit? Soot? Set? Maybe even stay? You literally don't know, but each of those might be valid even with how wildly the meaning could be different.
It's EXACTLY like that in Arabic, but much worse because it happens all the time. You highlight a word like 'كتب' (ktb) on its own. What does the TTS say? Does it guess 'kataba' (he wrote)? 'Kutiba' (it was written)? 'Kutub' (books (a freaking NOUN!))? Or maybe even 'kutubi' (my books)? The TTS literally just takes a stab in the dark, and usually defaults to the most basic verb form, 'kataba', even if the context screams 'books'!
So yeah. We're stuck with tools that make us work twice as hard just to understand our own language. You will get used to it over time, but It adds this whole extra layer of cognitive load that speakers of, say, English just don't have to deal with when using their screen readers.

#screenreader#blind#tts
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Dorota 🐺

I decided that I'm going to read the latest book in Martin Servaz series by Bernard Minier, and then after reading it I will be done and I can say that I've read all the books in that series. I'm not sure what the English title is, but the French one is "Un œil dans la nuit" I'm so happy that I still read one book per day, it hasn't changed. and this particular book will be a good choice for the night, before I go to sleep 😁 #Blind #Books.

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Jayson Smith

Our family is looking for a new gas stove. What are people recommending these days in the way of modern stoves with all the bells and whistles, but which are #accessible in some way? A stove that works with #Alexa and/or #Google smart speakers should work fine. At our last home we had an LG which worked with the ThinQ app, and could also be connected to smart speakers. The problem was, if you told your smart speaker to start the oven, it'd set a cook timer of fifteen minutes, which is useless for just about anything, and they got to where they wouldn't accept a new timer setting. Please boost for reach. Thanks. #blind

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Jonathan

So, since Windows this morning proved me again how incapable it is to handle my generic boring computer usage, I feel like I at least need to start looking into Linux. I mean maybe I like it, can't know if I never tried. So my question for all the #blind #Linux folks, what's the best way to get started with stuff like #Orca. Please don't flood me with some advanced whatever stuff. I just want to get something running on VMware to try around, to see how it's actually going. Of course I understand that there is a learning curve but I guess I'll need it sooner or later anyways, for whatever might come.

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Johanna Janiszewski

Personal review of project 2 of the #gameAccessibility course from #Unity, pt.3 Link: learn.unity.com/project/inclus

Follow up on last month's post, in which I talked about part 2.

TLDR: I investigated "BROK the investiGator" by @COWCAT . It's a punch and click game which is accessible to #blind players and has lots of #a11y options.

Read more in the next posts 👇

Have you ever researched an accessibility topic in depth? How did it go? Let me know, I am curious!

German language title screen of the game "BROK the investiGator". The first thing the player is presented with is the option to press space to access the accessibility options.
#gamedev
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