I've got a field on an iPhone app that contains "1.2 m". VoiceOver will speak this as "1 point 2 metres". I was a little surprised that VoiceOver was smart enough to understand units.
However, I have a different field that contains the text "1.2 m/s" which VoiceOver speaks as "1 point 2 metres slash S", which obviously isn't what I want. Another slight oddity is that in the Google Earth app, the longitude and latitude are pronounced as "xx degrees, xx minutes, xx inches" which is clearly wrong.
This raises a couple of questions for me:
What units does iOS VoiceOver understand?
Do I have any control over what VoiceOver says without setting the text explicitly in the accessibilityLabel? Can I tell it to understand that "m/s" is pronounced "metres per second"?
Bear in mind that people who depend on VoiceOver and use it every day to access information are familiar with its quirks and expect to hear information read out in a consistent way. Any efforts to work around those quirks might create an experience that is actually more confusing. That said, if your intended reader is unfamiliar with the units/numbers expressed, then a parenthetical clarification of any abbreviations will be of benefit to all users (not just those using VoiceOver).
For your first question, to be honest, I don't know the metrics perfectly handled by VoiceOver but I always make tests to be sure of what's vocalized : the best way to be 100% sure in my view.
About your second one, I always format the date, time and numbers I use in my labels so as not to have unpleasant surprise with a new iOS release that could weirdly interprets these elements: I follow these steps to format these data.
Related
Apologies if the title isn't very clear.
What I am trying to do is get a google sheet to automatically calculate how many lengths of a material I will need to cover an area, hopefully to include a mix if needed. There are three different lengths of material that never change, but the total area I need to cover changes on a case by case basis. It is only a straight line so there is no need to worry about width or height.
The data breaks down as follows:
Pre-set lengths to choose from
10'6"
12'6"
14'6"
Length of area I need to cover only comes in inches (ie. 68 1/2"; 70"; 59")
The only thing I have been successful in doing is getting the length I need to cover and then manually picking out how many pieces of each length I need, but I cannot think of any way for me to have a formula or script optimize how many of each piece I need. I can understand formulas well enough, but once trying to script anything comes into play I start getting lost. I believe this issue may be beyond the capabilities of formulas.
This is an interesting problem - I don't have the 'reputation' required to comment, but to be clear: you're actually trying to find the 'best fit' of the available lengths to cover the required length?
If that's the case then yes, you're not going to get there without scripting. Fortunately, there are other folks who have this problem and have solved it... you could look at this online cut-list calculator for an example. I think that one even includes an embeddable script for your sheets.
If you're looking to solve the problem yourself because it's interesting, googling 'optimal cut list' or the like will turn up references. Usually you're optimizing on two variables (e.g. 'fewest joins' and 'least waste'), which tips you over into the world of linear programming (only just...) if you want to go there. If it were me, I'd just dig up a few example scripts and map how they operate back to a theoretical description (e.g. this wiki article.)
I am trying to implement the accessibility to my ios project.
Is there a way to correct the pronunciation of some specific words when the voice-over is turned on? For example, The correct pronunciation of 'speech' is [spiːtʃ], but I want the voice-over to read all the words 'speech' as same as 'speak' [spiːk] during my whole project.
I know there is one way that I can set the accessibility label of any UIElements that I want to change the pronunciation to 'speak'. However, some elements are dynamic. For example, we get the label text from the back-end, but we will never know when the label text will be 'speech'. If I get the words 'speech' from the back end, I would like to hear voice-over read it as 'speak'.
Therefore, I would like to change the setting for the voice-over. Every time, If the words are 'speech', the voice-over will read as 'speak'.
Can I do it?
Short answer.
Yes you can do it, but please do not.
Long Answer
Can I do it?
Yes, of course you can.
Simply fetch the data from the backend and do a find-replace on the string for any words you want spoken differently using a dictionary of words to replace, then add the new version of the string as the accessibility label.
SHOULD you do it?
Absolutely not.
Every time someone tries to "fix" pronunciation it ends up making things a lot worse.
I don't even understand why you would want screen reader users to hear "speak" whenever anyone else sees "speech", it does not make sense and is likely to break the meaning of sentences:
"I attended the speech given last night, it was very informative".
Would transform into:
"I attended the speak given last night, it was very informative"
Screen reader users are used to it.
A screen reader user is used to hearing things said differently (and incorrectly!), my guess is you have not been using a screen reader long enough to get used to the idiosyncrasies of screen reader speech.
Far from helping screen reader users you will actually end up making things worse.
I have only ever overridden screen reader default behaviour twice, once when it was a version number that was being read as a date and once when it was a password manager that read the password back and would try and read things as words.
Other than those very narrow examples I have not come across a reason to change things for a screen reader.
What about braille users?
You could change things because they don't sound right. But braille users also use screen readers and changing things for them could be very confusing (as per the example above of "speech").
What about best practices
"Give assistive technology users as similar an experience as possible to non assistive tech users". That is the number one guiding principle of accessibility, the second you change pronunciations and words, you potentially change the meaning of sentences and therefore offer a different experience.
Summing up
Anyway this is turning into a rant when it isn't meant to be (my apologies, I am just trying to get the point across as I answer similar questions to this quite often!), hopefully you get the idea, leave it alone and present the same info, I haven't even covered different speech synthesizers, language translation and more that using "unnatural" language can interfere with.
The easiest solution is to return a 2nd string from the backend that is used just for the accessibilityLabel.
If you need a bit more control, you can pass an AttributedString as the accessibilityLabel with a number of different options for controlling pronunication
https://medium.com/macoclock/ios-attributed-accessibility-labels-f54b8dcbf9fa
I have a French website that is in LFR (Left to Right)
And the client is wanting to translate the site in hebrew thus transforming it to RTL (Right to Left). In all Hebrew Website the design is reversed
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.google.co.il/
Is there a way to do this automatically ? Again I am not talking about the text direction. I want to flip it horizontally the design, like a mirror effect.
Your mileage may vary. Some web page generation tools support RTL with easy switch, while with others the WYSIWYG breaks completely when you specify <html dir="rtl">. Browser fragmentation may also be an issue: some browser simply don't support RTL bulleted lists correctly.
There are quite a few good tutorials on the Web; I would recommend https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/building-rtl-aware-web-apps-and-websites-part-1/ and https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/building-rtl-aware-web-apps-websites-part-2/. If you look up Google to search for more articles, please remember that this field is quickly changing, and some recipes of few years ago may be obsolete.
You may find the automation with css-flip or rtlcss useful.
Note that localization is generally not easy, and invariably requires a manual touch. You must understand the target culture very well to recognize tiny glitches that may look awful to the end-user. For example, on Hebrew Website you need different image for the "back" button. On Arabic sites, some numbers should be represented by indic digits, but other numbers are expected to use the usual digits.
Issues of first day of week, etc. are common for LTR localizations, too.
I have a service that allows user's (admins) to change the terminology the site uses. My designer wants me to use the format "A Group". The problem is, for some terminology, it should be "An" not "A".
Is there any way to reliably detect which to use? What about localization?
I can brute force it and get 90% of the way by checking the first letter for consonant vs vowel. That won't work for all words though. And that doesn't cover any language except English.
In my opinion you've got only 2 ways:
1- You need to check the first letter and process all the sentence by checking its letters to see if there is any non-English letters.
2- Provide a dictionary of English nouns then you can easily check your word to find if it needs an "a" or "an".
Although the "a versus an" issue is very specific, what you're describing here is a natural language processing issue. Essentially you are being asked to write code that generates a grammatically correct piece of text.
I think you should try to to explain the implications to the designer, especially if you end up localizing in other languages. Your time is probably better spent working on your app's business logic than on language processing.
I want to experiment with an idea I have of automatically localizing software, or at least suggesting a reasonable translation if a localized string is not available.
I'm not sure this will be working satisfactorily tomorrow morning but I just wanted to play with this idea.
Does anybody know of a dictionary that is free to use, and is in an easy to parse format, that can help me automatically translate words from English to other European languages (French, German, Spanish, etc)
The FreeDict project has quite a few relatively complete dictionaries. Most are from one language to english or vice versa, but some are between two non-english languages as well.
I don't know any dictionary but would like to point something out. You have to bear in mind that translating is not a direct word to word technique in any sense. The Rules of the language change as well and thus leave sentences unreadable. This is why even companies like Google have trouble making good translation software. Context is very hard to programmatically detect and context means everything in choosing the right word, the right structure and so on.
Maybe use a Translation API, if there is one. Google only seem to do a JavaScript API for Language.
You can't even expect to get a reasonable translation with an automatic method. Translating full texts is too hard for a computer to handle completely correct, translating short phrases correctly is impossible.
Take for example the simple text "Open", without a context it's not even possible to tell if it's a verb or an adjective. I know that at least in german that the verb and the adjective translates into two different words.
Also, computer specific concepts often borrow words from similar concepts outside the computer sphere. Those concepts often have a specific translation, but an automatic translation would sometimes try to translate it as if it was the original meaning, which can give you very strange translations.
After a while of searching i solved the problem by myself start to create my own dictionary. I do a lot of translations in my free time. In the beginning it is really boring work...but after a while you get an really good dicitionary. Some friends of mine using it too...so we all benefit from every new Word we translate.