If you are blind, you can communicate in a variety of ways with iOS features. At the time, I wasnt a Mac user at all, so I thought it made more sense to go with.Blind Accessibility Apps. Of Android TalkBack and iPhone VoiceOver screen reader software. Use GhostReader Plus to create beautiful audiobooks, lively podcasts or proof-read your screenplay with all characters having their own voice.Why Don’t Screen Readers Always Read What’s on the Screen? Part 1: Punctuation and Typographic Symbols. Apps affairVoice Reader Text. Overall Voice Reader Text to Speech is definitely worth the 1.99, it has to be the best text to speech and also text to speech translator I have seen for a long time.
![]() Where Do I Get Voiceover Screen Reader Full Set OfIf you use HTML entities or other special characters, you’ll hear even less.This is partly (but not entirely) by design. If you type an HTML document using all the punctuation marks available on your keyboard and listen to a screen reader read the document in a web browser, you’ll hear only some of the punctuation and characters read aloud to you. Part 3 will focus on problems with pronunciation, including common content — like telephone numbers, dates, and abbreviations — as well as uncommon or new words, or words with more than one possible pronunciation.You Can’t Count on Screen Readers to Read Most Punctuation or Typographic SymbolsThe way screen readers treat punctuation is incredibly inconsistent from one screen reader to another, and there isn’t a single screen reader on the market that can reliably handle the full set of punctuation marks and typographical symbols that you might want to use.This means web developers can’t use an asterisk to denote a required field on a form, unless they supplement the asterisk with some other NVDA-friendly method. The NVDA screen reader, for instance, doesn’t read hardly any typographical symbols at all in its default configuration, making common symbols like asterisks and plus symbols essentially useless to NVDA users. But every screen reader has major flaws in reading some aspect of typographical symbols. Screen readers will pause at commas rather than say “comma,” and screen readers will say “don’t” rather than say “don apostrophe t.” Those are reasonable decisions. JAWS also reads the “less than or equal to” symbol incorrectly. Jaws incorrectly says “five dash two” when it should say “five minus two,” even when using the HTML entity − (not a regular dash) to specify the minus symbol. JAWS reads the plus symbol correctly, but not the minus symbol. It says “five two seven” when it should say “five plus two equals seven,” making it hard — or impossible — to write basic math expressions. There is too much potential for screen readers to miss out on the information that is right there in front of them. These are significant flaws in the most basic of screen reader functions: reading what’s on the screen. To its credit, VoiceOver does pause briefly for these elements, but users won’t know the difference between a dash, parentheses, or a quotation, because all pauses sound the same, even though the reasons for the pauses are all different, and should convey different semantic meanings.These are just some of the examples of where things can go wrong when trying to use basic punctuation or typographic symbols to communicate on the web. On the Mac side, VoiceOver doesn’t inform users about quotation marks, parentheses, or dashes, making it so users don’t know when quotation or parenthetical phrases begin or end. That’s a serious limitation. Between NVDA and JAWS, web authors who want to write even the most basic of arithmetic expressions — one plus one, or one minus one, for example — can’t count on screen readers to read them right. ![]() There’s no need to force a high verbosity level on all users.Even so, the verbosity probably should not be set so low by default that the screen reader can’t even read a URL correctly (for example, by not reading the colon or slashes), or convey even the most basic punctuation to readers. They may want to toggle the verbosity setting to “all punctuation” when reading code, and use a less verbose mode for reading prose. At the extreme end, blind web developers probably need to hear all the punctuation when reading HTML or JavaScript code, for example. By pausing instead of reading all punctuation, screen readers sound more natural and human-like, and that can be a good thing.But when the punctuation or typographic symbols convey important meaning, users need to be able to hear the punctuation and symbols, or the meaning will be lost. Minecraft mapper for macSuch apathy is counter-productive to the goal of creating an accessible web. I’m not responsible, because I did my part by putting the text in there.” Screen Reader Flaws Breed ApathyScreen reader flaws breed apathy among web developers and content writers. It should read the text, but it doesn’t. That doesn’t seem right, and it leaves authors with a no-win choice of either stripping the document of nearly all punctuation for all users, or writing out everything in words instead of punctuation (like “1 plus 1 equals 2” instead of “1+1=2”), or simply saying “I don’t care what the screen reader does. VoiceOver OSX 10.9.1, tested with Safari 7.0 (9537.71)In all cases, the screen reader language was set to English. JAWS , tested with Internet Explorer 9.0.23 on Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8 NVDA 2013.3, tested with Firefox 26.0 on Windows 7 Testing How Screen Readers Read Typographical SymbolsI knew that screen readers were inconsistent in the way they handled typographical symbols, but I didn’t know all of the intricate details of exactly what they did or didn’t read, so I set up some tests. No one should have to wonder if a screen reader will read text. I admit I sympathize with screen reader manufacturers when considering the scale of the task once you consider all possible character sets, but with just this limited set of common characters, the results are still disappointing. I’m not going to be that thorough. A more comprehensive test would involve different languages, all the characters in UTF-8, and all the HTML entities. I chose from among the more common characters characters that most English-speaking authors would expect screen readers to get right. How is it that there are still bugs in screen reader software for reading basic text and typographical symbols? That’s something screen readers should have perfected long, long ago.
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Your blog provides a comprehensive look into the challenges and capabilities of voiceover screen readers for Mac, shedding light on their importance and intricacies. It's a valuable resource for those navigating accessibility tools. Thank you for your insights!
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