Accessibility question: TTS and ligatures
 

I've decided to try and make my next upload to the MR library conform to accessibility standards. The text contains some ae- and oe-ligatures (which I am very fond of and would like to keep). Does anyone know if TTS programs are able to deal with them properly, or will I have to sacrifice them in the name of accessibility?

ivona tts

^ Does Ivona do ligatures? Is that what you are saying?

On a suggestion of Doitsu, I've assembled a list of words with ligatures from my project. Everybody feel free to test them on any TTS apps you have. Your help will be much appreciated!

Do the language tags make a difference?

<span lang="la" xml:lang="la">pupæ</span>
<span lang="la" xml:lang="la">Scarabæus</span>
Scarabæus
pupæ
dæmon
Primæval
mediæval
æons
Cæsar
hyæna
pæans
æolian
Uræus

Crœsus
phœnix
mythopœic
manœuvres
fœtid
<span xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">accroche-cœur</span>
accroche-cœur

You can test Ivona here

Seems to work with the words you provided although I had to indicate the language manually.

Wow, Ivona is impressive! Thanks. A nice person sent me a link to test Microsoft's TTS, and it is a disaster.

https://jsfiddle.net/kupkfgjg/

But I now think I will produce two different versions of the book, one with all visual bells and whistles, and an accessible one with simpler formatting and without those ligatures to make it as easy as possible for all kinds of TTS.

@doubleshuffle,

I own quite a lot of purchased English voices for Windows (by Ivona, Acapela, Nuance, AT&T). I also own a decent TTS program which can read epub and record to mp3. If you want to create a small test English epub, I could record it to mp3 for each voice and give you a link to the results.

The offer is there if you want it. If you do want to go ahead I suggest the epub text should be constructed to use the words in context of proper sentences, rather than just a list of words.

ETA: Thinking about it more, a simple .txt file would work just as well as an epub

Wow, that's a very generous offer! I'll create a test epub; I'll try to include everything that struck me as possibly problematic for TTS, so it might take a day or two. I think having a test epub accompanied with an mp3 would be a great thing to have for the whole bookmaking community here.

No rush, this is not a Cinderella offer which expires at midnight :)

I love TTS and wish more authors considered potential user difficulties with their "design" decisions before publishing:
- chapter headings as images
- dropcaps as images
- using 3 dots instead of a proper single ellipse (…) character
... I could go on …

I must admit, I had never spent a single thought on TTS before KevinH published the Access-Aide plugin for Sigil - so many of my uploads here are probably also TTS nightmares.

But it will be great to find out what does and doesn't work; whether it is possible to make all visual design gimmicks TTS compatible, or if it will be better to produce separate accessible editions.

Just a warning that I don't think my current Windows TTS app (TextAloud v3) will respond to any of these special tags/attributes. I think you'll just get the plain text read by the selected voice. We'll see …

Wouldn't the ALT attribute mitigate the problems with images?

If only ... :rolleyes: All I can say is that it doesn't seem to with any of the apps I've used, Windows or Android.

Maybe I'm using the wrong apps or have failed to configure the correct settings. I'm happy to be proved wrong if anyone else has found a winning combination they want to share :)

My question was theoretical, but I thought the whole point of the ALT attribute was to address accessibility and that accessibility was a major use case for TTS. It's a shame if no TTS out there uses the ALT attribute. No use shaming authors/publishers on that one then.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? I don't know much about the Accessibility stuff but it seems to me that Accessibility features of an OS and the TTS feature included in some of the better epub reader apps are not really related, at least not on Android. The same voice might be used by both, but that's about it. Even there, if you add a pronunciation correction for a word for a particular voice in an epub app, I'm not sure it will be used by the Accessibility app. IOS might be different, but I've never used it.

I suppose I ought to qualify my previous statement with "last time I tested this I couldn't find anything that worked". It was quite a while ago. Some of the Android apps get updated so frequently it's possible one of them snuck in a new feature without me noticing. I must get around to re-testing everything some time.

The saddest part about TTS is that most of the development effort seems to be going into corporate listening devices, like the Amazon Echo and Apple/Google/Microsoft equivalents. Personally I'd prefer more effort directed to truly enhancing the lives of the visually-impaired than general enhancement of shopping convenience, music playing and weather prediction.

JAWS and NVDA are the largest/most popular screen readers:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/Pro...Blindness/JAWS

https://www.nvaccess.org/

According to this site:

http://accessibleculture.org/researc...aws-we-all.php

the œ + æ ligatures are not spoken out by default in JAWS (although this could be outdated info, it was back in 2008).

Side Note: Also, a great resource for all things Accessibility is the "Web Accessibility in Mind" website. They explain reasons for using alt text with some examples:

https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

Side Note #2: Also, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and all the Web Accessibility rules are good standards to follow as well:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/alt/

Hmmm, I would shame some of these if they are creating books with poor Accessibility.

WCAG is becoming more important, especially in government documents (or academic resources).

And Accessibility is definitely a larger topic that libraries/publishers are going to begin to pushing for as well. Many ebookcraft talks the past few years covered this topic:

https://lernerbooks.blog/2018/04/acc...raft-2018.html

Creating a Roadmap for Accessibility - ebookcraft 2017

Anyone creating documents for the web should be keeping these types of processes in mind.

And don't just think "no current ereader I know of handles this", you have to keep in mind that:

• People convert/strip the EPUB
  • So they may just read the straight HTML, or read it as DAISY
• Future formats/tools/readers may handle the HTML better/differently
• There could be updates to the reading programs themselves (especially in the Android/iOS space)
• There could be tools out there you aren't currently aware of

And who knows, maybe in the future Amazon/Google may uprank books/sites that offer better Accessibility... and then some companies may be scrambling trying to introduce it to their backlog, when you instantly reap the benefits since you've been following good practices for years!