Re: Orca now running on AMD64 with latest Edgy installation

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Roland Zitzke wrote:

> Hi Bill,
>
>  
>
> > In case someone gets motivated, I think the relevant AT-SPI methods (for 
> > determining the language/locale of UI components), and gnome-speech 
> > methods (for determining the locales/langs which a TTS engine can speak) 
> > are these:
> >
> > Accessibility::Application:getLocale  (the locale of the running app)
> > Accessibility::Image:imageLocale (useful for determining the locale of ALT 
> > text/imageDescription)
> > Accessibility::Document:getLocale (for when the document specifies a 
> > locale different from the viewing app)
> > Accessibility::Text:getAttributeRun (text tagged with a different LANG 
> > will have an explicit LANG attribute)
> >
> >    
> this might be neither useful nor necessary. I guess it would be acceptable 
> if the user switches languages using a key combination.
> The reason I am saying this is that most multilingual users have a default 
> locale which they don't change when working in another language temporarily. 
>  
That may be true when composing content, but other kinds of mixed-locale 
usage will need the above APIs.  For instance if a warning dialog from 
an English app comes up while you're working in German, you want it to 
be intelligible.  Also, if you're viewing a French web page you don't 
necessarily want to switch locales manually just to use the File menu, 
etc.  Lastly, individual words need to be tagged if they are outside the 
document's main language, in order for a mixed lang document to be 
readable via text-to-speech.

The underlying accessibility system doesn't know you're writing in 
English, but it knows if the currently focussed application is in a 
German locale even if the desktop session as a whole is in English.  If 
you are writing a mixed-language document, or even just composing a new 
document, just like any other content creator you should me indicating 
the locale of the document.

While it's true that many existing documents don't indicate their locale 
or language, language tags do exist for many document types, and using 
them makes the documents more accessible for the above reasons.

best regards

Bill

> On Windows for instance I work in German 95% of the time and when having to 
> write in English I just change the speech manually by pressing a couple of 
> keys, not the locale as such. There's absolutely no way for the underlaying 
> accessibility system to figure out that I currently write an english text.
>
>
>  
>
> > GNOME::Speech:SynthesisDriver:getVoices(in VoiceInfo) - see 
> > GNOME::Speech:VoiceInfo.language
> >
> > The latter call to gnome-speech can be used to find a speaker suitable for 
> > a particular locale/lang.
> >
> >    
>
> This is something we'll definitely need i.e. get a choice of english voices 
> when English is chosen as the syntehsizer language etc.
>
> Btw: I am not a braille user but I do know that there are also locale 
> considerations for Braille, not just for speech.
>
> I will have a look at the API on one of the upcoming rainy weekends ;-)
>
> /Roland
>
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