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NVDA Japanese enhancements
Prehistory
1980s: Japanese screen reader introduced character descriptions.
1996: Japanese screen reader for Windows released, known as '95Reader'.
1998: 'PC-Talker' released.
1999: '95Reader' with Japanese braille support.
2001: JAWS for Windows from IBM Japan.
2006: Japanese mobile phone which announce the input method.
History
2006: NVDA released.
2008: Internet Technology Research Committee (ITRC) Universal Access to the Internet (UAI) started discussions of NVDA Japanese support. (Prof. Takayuki Watanabe, Mitsue-Links Co.,Ltd)
2010: Japanese speech engine, input method support. (Takuya Nishimoto, Masataka Shinke)
2011: Japanese braille support. 64bit system support.
2012: NVDA Japanese team restructured.
Internationalization
Japanese team (2012)
Works
Japanese requirements
State transitions
Chinese
Japanese
initial state
editing reading string (on the spot), before translation key pressed
composition string (on the spot), after translation key pressed
candidate selection (candidate window pop up), translation key pressed twice
Half shape/full shape
Discrimination
not necessary for understanding the meaning
necessary for writing, typing URLs, filling web forms (especially user authorization), software development
Characters 1
Characters 2
Ideographs
Kanji in Japanese, Hanzi in Chinese, Hanja in Korean
Chinese traditional > Japanese > Chinese simplified
typically many readings for Japanese
Symbols, punctuations
Writing system
Sentence contains both syllables and ideographs
Word is not separeted with spaces
Pronunciation of ideograph depends on the context
Character descriptions 1
Character descriptions 2
Charater description
spelling reading (with dictionary)
ideographic character: necessary for descrimination
phonetic reading: help listening of speech
Character attributes
similarity to announce capital letter
half-shape/full-shape (Latin, katakana, number, symbol)
types of syllable character: katakana/hiragana
Keyboard 1
Keyboard 2
Applications
Devices
Future