1121362 - Firefox OS screenreader using incorrect voice

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect)

Description

[Friedel Wolff]

When using the Afrikaans (af) locale, I activate the screenreader which then tries to read the Afrikaans labels with the English voice. The result is not really accessible or helpful, obviously.

I realise that adding a new voice is probably a big undertaking, and we should look into that, but maybe right now we can consider one of the simpler solutions:

 - Disable the screenreader if someone is not using a supported language (I couldn't find out what is supported or how to improve on that). This would be a bit unfortunate to have to do.

 - Fall back to English or another supported language, or provide prompts in a supported language on how to proceed.

We might also want to warn people during First-time experience if they pick a language that is not supported (if the screenreader is already active).

This should probably be considered in the wider context of our support for the multilingual use cases of the screenreader, but for now I'm reporting this specific issue I encountered in testing.

Eitan, partly because of your recent blog post, you are my CC target on how to go ahead with this and who should be alerted of this bug. I'm not even sure if I picked the right component :-) Anyway, I'm pretty sure your blog post resulted in me testing this, so thanks!

Comment 1

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Thanks. Friedel for this report.

We will hopefully have support for Afrikaans in the near/medium future. I didn't try the af locale, but I am assuming it is actually more usable than other, Asian and Semitic, languages where there is no synthesis at all.

I'm going to test with other devices to see how they resolved this issue. In the meantime, if you want to get a list of supported languages you could do:
window.speechSynthesis.getVoices()

Comment 2

[Friedel Wolff]

Closing since the product was canned.