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I have a random question about screen-reading software (self.Blind)
submitted by Nicksaurus
I'm fully sighted. For those of you who use screen-reading software, how well does it handle punctuation?
For example, my previous sentence ended with a question mark. Did your software pick that up and make the sentence sound different accordingly? If someone ends a sentence with an exclamation mark, do you hear that?
What about misspellings? Does your software generally work out what word it's meant to be? I'm just curious about these things.
For example, my previous sentence ended with a question mark. Did your software pick that up and make the sentence sound different accordingly? If someone ends a sentence with an exclamation mark, do you hear that?
What about misspellings? Does your software generally work out what word it's meant to be? I'm just curious about these things.
fastfinge 7 points 6y ago
It handles all of the above just fine, and the way it handles them is generally user configurable. I'm using $1, and to take punctuation as an example, I get to decide if I want "all", "most", "some", or "none" read. NVDA has categorized 147 different punctuation marks into these categories, and set up defaults for how each different punctuation mark should be treated. However, I can go into the symbols editor, and re-categorize any symbol I want, or change how it gets treated, if I'm unhappy with the default choice. If I can think of a symbol they didn't categorize, I can also add it there. However, when they list symbols like "end of proof", "small contains as member", "nabla", and "non-breaking space", I'd be hard pressed to think of any punctuation they missed.
Nicksaurus [OP] 2 points 6y ago
OK, so does it just read out the name of the symbol and leave you to interpret the tone of the sentence? Are there any common situations it can't handle well?
fastfinge 4 points 6y ago
> does it just read out the name of the symbol and leave you to interpret the tone of the sentence?
It can. Or I can set it to pass punctuation on to the synthesizer unmodified, and the synthesizer (the program that actually generates the speech) will generally change the tone of the speech to represent different punctuation. If I'm reading things like Reddit comments, I want the tone of speech to change as a result of punctuation. If I'm programming, I just want every single symbol read out. So I have different configuration profiles set up, that I switch between depending on what I'm doing.
> Are there any common situations it can't handle well?
It still struggles with unicode and emoticons. There is a $1 to help, but it only has 146 different emojies defined, and there are 1851 of them currently.
However, this is an NVDA thing, probably because it's free and open source. VoiceOver for IPhone and Mac OS knows about all 1851 of them, and handles them correctly. I suspect that propperly reading the poop emoji just isn't a priority for the NVDA developers.
It can. Or I can set it to pass punctuation on to the synthesizer unmodified, and the synthesizer (the program that actually generates the speech) will generally change the tone of the speech to represent different punctuation. If I'm reading things like Reddit comments, I want the tone of speech to change as a result of punctuation. If I'm programming, I just want every single symbol read out. So I have different configuration profiles set up, that I switch between depending on what I'm doing.
> Are there any common situations it can't handle well?
It still struggles with unicode and emoticons. There is a $1 to help, but it only has 146 different emojies defined, and there are 1851 of them currently.
However, this is an NVDA thing, probably because it's free and open source. VoiceOver for IPhone and Mac OS knows about all 1851 of them, and handles them correctly. I suspect that propperly reading the poop emoji just isn't a priority for the NVDA developers.
Itsthejoker 2 points 6y ago
What happens if it hits an emoji that it doesn't know? We've been telling volunteers to use the actual emotes rather than typing out the names; I was under the impression that most modern screen reading software could handle them.
fastfinge 2 points 6y ago
Any screen reading software made by Apple can. For everyone else, it varies. In general, though, if it can't read the symbol, it will read out the unicode codepoint that can be googled. So for example, NVDA reads the $1 emoji, so common on Reddit, as symbol d83c symbol df82. Doing a google search for "d83c df82" returns $1 that gives me the information I need. Then I can just add "birthday cake" as a symbol in NVDA, and it will read it correctly from then on.
Nicksaurus [OP] 2 points 6y ago
Right, OK. Well I think you have completely satisfied my curiosity. Thanks for answering.
fastfinge 3 points 6y ago
> Thanks for answering.
No problem! If you have an iPhone or mac computer, feel free to just give voiceover a try. Or if you have Windows, you can download and run NVDA for free.
No problem! If you have an iPhone or mac computer, feel free to just give voiceover a try. Or if you have Windows, you can download and run NVDA for free.
webgurl83 2 points 6y ago
I'm using JAWS and I set it to not read the symbols themselves. It does a fine job with inflection though, so I'll know if your sentence ends with a question mark.
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