Note by @fastfinge

Mx. Eddie R @silvermoon82@wandering.shop

5mo

Can screen readers translate alt text? Text in general? If not, do they at least read the language correctly?

Sight reading, I can pick my way through a lot of not-English; German, Spanish, even a bit of Russian, and from that I can puzzle.out a bit of related languages.

Does that work with a screen reader? Or does it read out the eg. German text with English phonetics and make a total hash of it?

3

1

0

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5mo

@silvermoon82 It depends. If the user speaks both languages, and the lang attribute on the HTML has been set correctly, then the screen reader will read the correct text in the correct language. If the HTML lang attribute is not set, the user can change the language manually using a screen reader hotkey. However, these things assume the user has installed and configured voices that speak both languages. For example, I currently do not have a Russian voice installed (because I don't understand Russian anyway), so my screen reader will just read out unicode character codes, because it has no way of pronouncing the Russian alphabet. There are also addons that can recognize the language text is written in, and change the screen reader language automatically even if the language attribute isn't set, but most folks don't bother with these. As for translation: there are third party addons that can take all the text spoken by a screen reader, translate it into another language, and then speak it. However, this introduces lag, and sends everything the screen reader says off to a third party translation service. I would only use something like this if I was, for example, playing a Japanese game where I knew all text would be in Japanese, so my screen reader would just translate to English before speaking. I wouldn't just leave it on all the time.

1

2

3

0

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5mo

@silvermoon82 Also, if it's not a western, colonial European, or east-Asian language, screen reader support for it will be terrible. As far as I'm aware, there is zero support for any indigenous languages spoken by the people living in what are now Canada and the United States, in any screen reader or text to speech voice, anywhere. Same goes for many middle-eastern and African languages, as well as stuff like Irish Gaelic. If you speak those languages and are blind, your only real choice is...learn a different language and never use your phone or computer to read anything in your native language. Somehow, I doubt anyone on the fediverse is surprised by this.

0

1

0