[Accessibility] Names of characters and keys

Jonathan Duddington jsd at clara.co.uk
Thu Jul 6 11:21:55 PDT 2006


A text-to-speech facility needs to include the ability to speak the
names of individual characters and also the names of keys on a computer
keyboard.

These are specified with the
  interpret-as="tts:char"
  interpret-as="tts:key"
attributes in http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/tts-api/tts-api.html

1.  Does a list of these names already exist on the computer, perhaps
as part of internationalization data, or does every speech synthesizer
need to produce a list for every language which it supports?

2.  Should characters be announced with their proper unicode name, such
as:
 "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX"
 "RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK"

or would more abbreviated names be expected?

3.  When spelling a word (from  interpret-as="glyphs" ) what should the
TTS do if it finds a letter which is not part of the language's normal
alphabet?  For example in English, "cafe" with an e-acute, or
"angstrom" with "Latin letter A with ring above", or a German letter
"sharp S" for "ss"?

-- 


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