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NVDA Japanese enhancements
Prehistory
1980s: Japanese screen reader. character description.
1988: online braille translation by IBM Japan
1996: 95Reader. screen reader for Windows
1997: IBM Home Page Reader. male voice for text, female voice for link.
1998: PC-Talker. best selling in Japan.
1999: 95Reader with Japanese braille support.
2001: JAWS for Windows from IBM Japan.
2006: Mobile phone which announce 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, character desription. (Takuya Nishimoto, Masataka Shinke)
2011: Japanese braille support. 64bit system support. local community in Hiroshima city.
2012: NVDA Japanese team restructured.
Python & nvdajp
PyCon mini JP, PyCon JP 2011
Bazaar version control system, lunchpad.net, sourceforge.jp
ctypes for Japanese speech engine, text analysis, braille display driver
Python for NVDA and add-ons
Plone for workshop.nvda.jp web site
NLTK for natural language processing?
Internationalization
NVDA Translation team: 40 languages.
messages, documents, symbols
character descriptions (from Chinese community)
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
speech engine is pluggable. braille translator is not.
Input methods
Character review functions
Works
Development for Japanese users
Support international users of Japanese language
Participate in international team
Japanese requirements
Why/how Chinese support and Japanese support are different?
No screen reader have merged Japanese version and international version?
Characteristics of Japanese language
Technical limitations
State transitions
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 1
Sentence contains both syllables and ideographs
Word is not separeted with spaces
Pronunciation of ideograph depends on the context
Writing system 2
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
Japanese speech
Applications
Input method editors (third parties)
PC-Talker companions
OpwBE: braille translation tool
Hidemaru editor, domestic e-mail clients
Braille support
Braille translator
(1) Pre-process
(2) Morphological analysis (Japanese)
(3) Morphological unit processing (Japanese)
word break, long vowel marks
Latin, number, Japanese symbol
number translation
(4) Word break detemination (Japanese)
(5) Post-process: make dot patterns
merge Japanese and English/computer
foreign mark, cap mark, number mark, braille symbols
Future