- nishimotz atmark gmail.com
This is an old revision of the document!
~~SLIDESHOW~~
NVDA Japanese enhancements
- The Localization of NVDA for Japanese Language Users
- Takuya Nishimoto, Director of NVDA Japanese Team
- nishimotz @ gmail.com / Twitter @nishimotz
- to appear in
- NVDA Workshop in Japan (Sep.16,2012)
- NVDA Japanese public meeting (Sep.17,2012)
Prehistory
- 1980s: Japanese screen reader. character description.
- 1996: Japanese screen reader for Windows released, known as '95Reader'.
- 1997: IBM Home Page Reader. male voice for text, female voice for link.
- 1998: 'PC-Talker' released. best selling in Japan.
- 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
- NVDA Translation team: 40 languages.
- messages
- documents
- symbols, character descriptions
- add-ons: OCR, Vocalizer
- community web site
- Dependency (Japanese support unavailable)
- eSpeak: multi-lingual open-source speech synthesizer
- liblouis: multi-lingual open-source braille translator
Japanese team (2012)
- Team: non-profit developer community
- 24 persons
- weekly Skype meeting
- Japanese Users List
- 179 persons
- e-mail discussions
- Friends
- text book for support volunteers
- Taiwan-Japan collaboration
- bi-monthly Skype meeting
Works
- Represent Japanese users
- develop enhancement for Japanese
- 2012.2.1jp: more than 2000 downloads
- define requirement for Japanese support
- Support international users of Japanese language
- add-on speech engine
- Participate in international team
- support East-Asia enhancement work
- migration from localization to internationalization
Japanese requirements
- Why/how Chinese support and Japanese support are different?
- Domestic conventions?
- screen readers since 1980s
- Characteristics of Japanese language
- explained in CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition
- uniqueness of writing system, braille system
- Technical limitations
- keyboard, speech engine
Input methods
- Same technology
- Input Method Manager (IMM), Text Service Framework (TSF)
- Difference of writing systems
- Candidate is not single character
- State transition is differenct
State transitions
- Chinese
- initial state
- editing reading string (on the spot)
- candidate selection (composition window)
- 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
- History: single byte/double byte
- Unicode: shape does not correspond to byte size
- Input method
- disabled: half shape only
- enabled: half shape and full shape are selectable
- Discrimination
- not necessary for understanding the meaning
- necessary for writing, typing URLs, filling web forms (especially user authorization), software development
Characters 1
- Latin (alphabet)
- half shape, full shape
- Number
- half shape roman digit, full shape roman digit, ideograph
- Pronunciation syllable (Kana)
- Hiragana: grammatical words, inflectional endings
- Katakana: foreign words. half shape and full shape
Characters 2
- Ideographs
- Kanji in Japanese, Hanzi in Chinese, Hanja in Korean
- Chinese traditional > Japanese > Chinese simplified
- typically many readings for Japanese
- Symbols, punctuations
- 600 full shape symbols by Japanese standard.
- some symbols available for half shape and full shape
Writing system 1
- Sentence contains both syllables and ideographs
- Word is not separeted with spaces
- Pronunciation of ideograph depends on the context
- Input method
- syllable-to-ideograph conversion using dictionary
Writing system 2
- Braille
- popular six-dot system
- syllable based symbols are defined for Japanese braille.
- special rules for word breaks.
- ideographic braille: six-dot system and eight-dot system
- Speech synthesis
- pronunciation of single character (spelling reading) is undefined.
- Morphological analysis: useful in many places
- based on dictionary, and sometimes statics (machine learning)
Character descriptions 1
- Chinese: many examples and explanations
- announce first or announce all
- Japanese: one example or explanation
- written in syllable character
- Usage
- input method candidates
- character review
- text edit: very frequently
Character descriptions 2
- Charater description
- spelling reading (with dictionary)
- ideographic character: necessary for descrimination
- both for speech and braille display
- phonetic reading: help listening of speech
- latin character for English
- syllable character for Japanese katakana and hireagana
- Character attributes
- similarity to announce capital letter
- possible with speech, beep, pitch
- half-shape/full-shape (Latin, katakana, number, symbol)
- types of syllable character: katakana/hiragana
Syllable input
- Transliteration: Latin-to-syllable (roman)
- US key array
- Japanese key array
- braille input (Latin six-dot system)
- Direct: (kana)
- Japanese key array
- braille input (Japanese six-dot system)
Keyboard 1
- Half-shape/Full-shape key
- enable or disable input method
- US key array: ALT-tilde is equivalent
- Non-Conversion key
- input mode change
- do not convert reading string (Hiragana)
- convert reading string from Hiragana to Katakana
- Conversion key
- space key is equivarent in most cases
- Katakana/Hiragana/Roman key
- with ALT modifier, syllable input mode change
Keyboard 2
- Caps Lock key
- in Japanese array, cannot be used as NVDA modifier key
- Variations
- Non-Conversion equivalents: Ctrl-U,I,O,P and F6-F9
- Preferences
- change mode before typing syllables
- (non) convert after typing syllables
Applications
- Input method editors (third parties)
- ATOK from Just System, Google Japanese Input, Baidu IME
- PC-Talker companions
- NetReader may be associated with web pages.
- OpwBE
- Hidemaru editor
- ControllerClient enhancement: speakSpelling
Devices
- KGS braille display
- serial port support requested
Braille translator design
- (1) Pre-process
- separation: Japanese, English, computer
- (2) Morphological analysis (Japanese)
- Mecab already used for JTalk speech engine
- (3) Morphological unit processing (Japanese)
- word break, long vowel marks
- Latin, number, Japanese symbol, space
- number translation
- (4) Word break detemination
- (5) Post-process
- merge Japanese and English/computer
- foreign mark, cap mark, number mark, braille symbols
- make dot patterns
Future
- Separate interface language and content language
- speech is already multilingual
- multilingual input methods support
- Costly development in Japanese community
- is our language really special?
- Character/symbol description
- efficiency: for engineer
- correctness: for school
