Reading Bilingual Books on iOS is An Albatross, and Something should be Done about It

this is an excellent post and i would like to add my thoughts.

I speak french and really enjoyed the examples taken from coffee break french. i am learning spanish and i wanted to purchase that course. however, if i can't hear the spanish, well, in spanish, i don't see its value of me spending 40 uk pounds for a course with explanatory notes that will be quite frankly, unusable. what i did notice though was when the original poster stated to read these texts with voiceover, i had to switch my language to the "default" option, which in my case is samamtha to allow the switching between english, and french in the examples to occur. it would not do this if the rotor language was set differently. why even for the coffee break french course, did it switch? did you mark the examples or did it just work of its own accord? could i not just read the notes for the course in safari to experience the language switching? i would really have thought, no offence here that voice-dream would have done this switching effortlessly after all it is a paid item.

Hi! Even though I have never done any kind of language course on IOS, I have read novels in English which happened to have passages written in other languages in them, French for example, so I can totally relate to this post. I admit that when I am reading a book, in iBooks, Kindle or Voice Dream Reader, I don't always use my default VoiceOver voice for that, but it seems that doing so doesn't make a difference in those book readers anyway. Even on the computer, language changes aren't always well tagged, so I'm not surprised they aren't on i-devices either. Luckily I don't read many books where there are sudden language changes, but it would still be great if VO would detect those changes when they occur, and switch to the right language when necessary in iBooks or Kindle, or that Voice Dream Reader could switch to another language's voice at the right moment.

Amir, perhaps the reason that Voice Dream Reader does not support language switching is that the text-to-speech API that it is using does not support this feature.

What do you mean when you say "I'm wondering how you can tell your iPhone's Safari to grab and open these HTML files especially when they gradually cumulate"? Could you save the files to the reading list in Safari?

hi all, how would it work though in voicedream with a pdf document, such as those for learning languages, if it was not tagged propperly?
Also, to the original poster, did you know that a reading club for coffee break languages is coming out? each week they will send you a pdf french text in your case, along with english translations. but of course the french would read say, in voicedream, but not the english if it were below the french. for a paid product, i would hope voice-dream can do this, particularly as it is marketed as an educational tool.

hi amir, send me a private message if you wish but was just wondering. i am subscribed to coffee break spanish in overcast but if i paid for the premium version can i access all the bonus audio etc. direct in my podcast client and the notes even though they don't read right for us? or how would it work?

hi amir and all, if voice-dream could implement it i'd be happy, but don't see how voiceover can switch without the tags.

Have you contacted the developer of Voice Dream Reader about the language switching ability? Perhaps it is something that can be incorporated into the app but they currently do not know it is something that customers want. I have heard that the developer is willing to listen to and work with VoiceOver users, so it is worth a try, I think.

"As for reading those HTML files in Safari, what I meant was that the guides are in PDF. So I open them via MS Word on Windows, make sure the language tags are properly in place, save the files as HTML, and send them to myself as email attachments. Once accessed on my iPhone, they can be shared with apps like iBooks and Voice Dream Reader, but I can't find a Safari Reading List in the sharing options presented to me."

Have you tried sending to Dropbox? I just did this with an HTML file that has both English and Spanish content. The HTML files can be read accessibly in the Dropbox app and also sorted alphabetically. This may not be as ideal as viewing in VDR, but it works.

I realize that is a controversial headline.
It would be nice for developers to understand that we need special tools to help us to learn when we have no visual cues. Part of learning another language involves recognizing what objects and people are talking about.
For years I've thought about taking a second language course. But, when I looked into it, it seemed very difficult especially since these courses are not designed for people with vision loss. The web resources I checked out for the blind say that learning another language is difficult for various reasons. I agreed with those reasons. I did not do well at French in high school. I live in Canada. It would be nice to know our second official language.

amir, how would i tag the files (i use a mac though) to make the mac itself or voiceover on my iphone switch the languages? i would be prepared to if i can, tag every lesson note of all languages to get it working for us. it will be a huge undertaking but i feel it would help us as blind users.

does anyone know if i set languages in pages for highlighted text as Amir just described for windows?

I can't speak for many developers. Still, I believe that voice dream, at the least, should be able to add this feature given that it already employs language detection so that documents can be read in any single language. Extending it to detect properly-tagged languages should be very feasible. I am also going to collect the requisite data for voice dream to use the siri voices in IOS 11. These have ceased to be available because apple has introduced new versions of the databases, but adding support to them again should be relatively straightforward as long as we can identify the names of the new databases. I would suggest that we recommend these changes to the developer of voice dream. Although I had assumed that development had been slowed given a long-unsolved bug in voice dream where the app would refuse to have any audio output after it had been paused for a while, an update was recently released that supposedly patches that bug (although a quick test seems to indicate that it may have added a different bug). As soon as I have found the names of the new siri databases, I will be suggesting both changes to the voice dream developers. I encourage you to do the same.

hi amir et and all, have just e-mailed winston from voicedream and linked to this discussion. could voicedream do the language switching or would the files still have to be tagged for it to readz this would still not let us even in vdr read coffee break language notes amir.

just trying to see how in pages or on mac in general i set language specific tags then i could get to work on the coffee break stuff

got this from coffee break languages, when i mentioned about the tagging and could it be done. i know we'd have to get the pdf in to%text edit add tags i guess, and save as html. can we who are interested in at least reading languages try and get on-board? if someone can message me the syntax for tagging texts in html i'll start to work on the sample that Mark will provide. i will of course share the example with their permission with applevis so we can see if it works when reading in safari.

Coffee Break Languages, 12:05 pm, Hi William,

Thanks for your message. We have been looking at more ways to make our content as accessible as possible and your message is very interesting.

I've actually been looking into this this morning and trying to look at the methods required to produce correctly tagged documents to allow the foreign voice to read the content correctly in the language. My research has actually taken me to the AppleVis website where I've read the discussion about the Coffee Break courses.

We work with Macs and create our lesson notes in Pages. It used to be the case that Pages allowed you to identify the language or a particular word or phrase and we used character styles in order to identify these. Pages now identifies the language automatically, but having done a number of experiments this morning it appears that this is only for spelling autocorrect, rather than to output any kind of tagged content.

I've tried recreating the files in Word, Google Docs and text editors, but only Word allows you to identify the language of a word or sentence, but even then the PDF export or the HTML export doesn't include the tags.

I've also downloaded GhostReader Plus and tried that - it seems to work perfectly for reading the text aloud on my computer and creating audio versions of the text with the correct language, but it doesn't seem to allow exporting the text with tags.

I'm very happy to look further into this, but I would want to make sure that if we move ahead with reworking our entire back catalogue into a format that allows correctly tagged documents for visually impaired learners, we do so in an appropriate way. We have many hundreds of documents across our courses, and if this is something we can take on ourselves we would be happy to start that work. It is a huge undertaking, and the ideal scenario would be that we could find a way to produce the documents in the first place with a system which allows for correct text to speech based on the multiple languages in one document.

Can I ask what system you would use for marking up the text with the language tags?

The other aspect which we'd need to consider is that our text documents are part of our premium content: visually impaired learners wanting to access our free content can use our audio podcasts. The lesson notes would only be for paying customers, and therefore a marked up version of these notes would also be for paying customers. I hope that makes sense.

I'm very happy to continue the discussion and hope that this is of some use. Equally, I'm happy to provide access to some content for you to work on. You can let me know what format works best.

Best wishes,
Mark

If you are writing directly in HTML, defining alternate languages is done with the span tag and the lang attribute. For example, one would type <span lang="es"> to initiate the change to Spanish (language code es) and a </span> to change back. The primary language is set on the html tag, again with the lang attribute (<html whatever-specification-is-in-use-here lang="en">
I would recommend not doing this manually, but at least you know how to do so. There are a number of methods that could be used. One is to use a custom program that reads in data and puts the tags automatically--for example, a script that would recognize a specific string could just replace it with the proper span tags and would take five minutes to write. It may also be feasible to do so in markdown or another shorthand system. I don't know how to do it from within pages, and I imagine that even in word retroactively marking up any document would be painful.

ok mark from coffee break languages, has sent me some notes from a french course for premium users in pdf, rtf and doc. the audio version he has produced, was done with ghostwriter on the mac. where can i get this? this works beautifully and uses, in his case Daniel for the english, and a compact french voice. would those of us who want to study these courses, want audio notes, or written? i assume it is quite easy to use ghostwriter as it seems to mark up the switch for us, but isn't that like listening to another podcast?
Obviously we couldn't see with the cursor how a verb for example, is spelt. what do people want from this? i'd be happy if i could get ghostreader, to do this for people. i would show the example he sent me but of course its copyright. where can i get this markdown or something similar as i want to manipulate the doc file to get it in to htm to read in safari and see if i can make voiceover switch. thoughts?

Hi everyone. As you'll be aware I've been in touch with Will and we're very keen to make our courses more accessible. Obviously this is a long process, but if we can change our current processes to ensure that, moving forward, our new content will be using a format which will help visually-impaired learners use our lesson notes, then we can start working on our back catalogue too.

I'm not quite sure if it's possible to post a file here in the forum, but I'll try to post our experiments with GhostReader. They only allow you to export the file as an audio file, but I've contacted the developers to see if it's possible in some way to export the file as a correctly tagged html. I'll keep you posted.

To Mark, I am wondering what source format you are using for this process--it seems that it already has language tags. Given this, a program that converts it to a properly-tagged HTML file, assuming such does not already exist, would be relatively straightforward to write. If you are interested, I am willing to volunteer some time to write such an application given the current specifications you are using. I have never used your language courses before, but from the short excerpts posted here, it does seem relatively straightforward. In addition, there exist certain detection libraries for determining the language used in an arbitrary text string, usually the result of machine learning algorithms. This system could be put to use in tagging of older data that currently lacks this. If any of these suggestions are of interest to you, you can of course reply here or send me a message and I will do my best.
To the other posters here, the issue of Coffee Break languages, while perhaps important to some, is merely a symptom of the larger problem noted in the post. Even if the properly-tagged HTML is created, it will mostly be usable in web browsers. E-book programs seem to disregard these tags anyway, so we should re-focus our efforts to requesting that the book reading programs be updated to support language changes. This might not be a simple change to make, as some programs might not currently plan on multilingual data, but it should be well within the capabilities of developers to add this feature with some time. If you are a user of a book-reading app, it could be quite helpful for you to suggest this change to the developer of it.

I have just tested some book reader apps to see what they do with multilingual text and documents that are properly tagged. Unfortunately, I can substantiate all reports of bad handling. I tested four. Easy reader from dolphin gets eliminated first because it can't read HTML, PDF, or basically anything. Evidently I should have read the manual first. So it bombed out rather fast. ClaroSpeak lost second because, although it can support certain formats, HTML is not among them. I exported the test documents to PDF, which worked in that the data was there, but all language tags were ignored. To clarify, I tested one document that was entirely in another language and another with mixed content. The only two that got the whole-document language were voice dream reader and capti narrator. They were both able to detect the language for the single-language document and switch appropriately. Thus, they should both be able to add language switching. For the mixed-language document, voice dream stayed with the original language of the document and didn't switch. Capti took the opposite approach and stayed in the second language. I have no good explanation, as the language tag was English, the first words were in English, and the Spanish didn't start until the middle. Either they got stuck on the Spanish because of the single-language document I ran before, or capti is just insane. Either way, neither app is any good at all. If you use either of them, it would be helpful to ask the developer to add language switching in HTML documents. Once we can get properly-tagged ones, at least that should function well.

it's not the application problem it's the epub problem. they need to make the tag readable while using it on the app. I read the book with another language but if the book didn't do the proper tag then yes i can not read it but if they did then I won't have any problem.