Re: Is VoiceOver dyslexic?
Re: Is VoiceOver dyslexic?
- Subject: Re: Is VoiceOver dyslexic?
- From: Michael Ash <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:49:17 -0400
On Jun 26, 2009, at 12:14 PM, Daniel Schwill wrote:
Also, could it be that VoiceOver is speaking them correctly, but
the two are just hard to tell apart when spoken? (Just saying them
out loud myself they sound almost identical "merged d" and "merged
e"). Maybe a different string would be more unambiguous? Perhaps
"merged from d7" and "merged from e7".
I'm not a native speaker and maybe that's why these strings sounds
very similar in VoiceOver for me.
VoiceOver speaks these strings better when I change them like
"merged, D7 till H7" or "merged, E7 till H7", but I don't know
whether VoiceOver may speak them like "merged comma D7 till H7"
depending on the user settings for VoiceOver.
"merged from D7 till H7" and "merged from E7 till H7" sound very
different in VoiceOver, but I thought that the description and help
attributes should be as short as possible.
You're just seeing a bug. Not in VoiceOver, but in English.
"Merged E7" and "Merged D7" will sound virtually identical when spoken
by a native speaker who is not taking pains to be extremely careful to
differentiate between the two. That they sound similar to you is not
your fault; they ARE similar.
Problems like this is why systems such as the NATO phonetic alphabet
were developed for communicating over noisy channels and when precise
understanding is crucial. "Merged echo 7" and "merged delta 7" are
easy to distinguish.
Of course you probably can't expect all of your users to know the NATO
phonetic alphabet, so what to do? You'll need to change your phrasing
so that the word that comes before the letter doesn't have a sound
that could change the meaning of the letter. A "D" sound is clearly
not a good one to have. Putting "from" in the middle is a good idea,
or you could change "merged" to "merging", or something similar.
Inserting a pause is IMO not a good idea, as it merely reduces the
ambiguity but does not remove it.
It's good to have your phrase be as short as possible, but *no
shorter*. "Merged X till Y" is too short to be unambiguously understood.
(I also want to second James's suggestion of using "to" instead of
"till", which is not really appropriate to use here.)
Mike
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Accessibility-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden