I work on a multilingual website that will contain many languages that are not normally written, and I wonder if there are any ways to get this working for people using screen readers?
E.g: one of the translators in the project, that is using a screen reader, is speaking English, but translated the project into his native language Kambaata (a language from Ethiopia). As it is not normal to write Kambaata we're going to add prerecorded sound files to the website to help native Kambaata speakers read the text. We're going to add sounds files for several languages in the project, and I wonder if it is possible to get this communicated to the screen reader so it will use our prerecorded sound files instead of trying to read the text itself?
I'm also happy if anyone have general tips about how to make a multilingual website as accessible as possible.
Comments
Fascinating question! You need more input than we can give here.
Although I welcome further discussion here, I encourage you to go to webaim.org, join their discussion forum (start by following the "Community" link; you'll get there in about three clicks), and pose your question there.
WebAIM is a nonprofit dedicated to accessibility and to teaching folks how to achieve it. Their forum includes members of the W3C's HTML Working Group as well as a number of working groups focused on accessibility. Yours might be considered an edge case, but you will be bringing up points they need to consider. And you might just get the answer you need. After all, the people on that list are among the world's foremost experts on the topic.
I look forward to seeing the discussion begin among them.
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Similar issues in Canada
Agree with Cliff that this is an interesting area.
In Canada there are similar issues with first nation's communities. Many people speak Cree (or other languages), but can't read it. Now in this situation there does exist a written language (although I don't think it's going to be supported by screen readers).
We had some initial discussions about how to address this type of situation years ago, but ultimately the contract didn't go through so we didn't take it any further.
With no written language to refer to it would be much more difficult. You'd probably want to have audio files hang off of the written text as alternatives that could be read out.
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Thanks for the answers, I got
Thanks for the answers, I got some other ideas here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16629828/how-can-i-replace-the-screen...
(mgifford: I poster your comment there just in case it can give some lead to someone, hope you don't mind).
On guy wrote to me that an (expenvieve) solution can be to use a "Synthesizer". Do anyone have experience with this? As we can get sounds files and text, maybe it is possible to map those together to make it possible to extend the screen readers for new languages?