Hi,
So far I have a Mac and an iPhone. Reading Hebrew with Mac seems to be the worst bet. Unless the authors specifically tag the passages with Hebrew language code, VoiceOver will read the text as letters (in English), or in some cases, it won't read it at all.
iOS seems to have a better language detection performance, but I have doubt that VoiceOver is pronouncing the words incorrectly.
My research for finding a Hebrew TTS for Mac OS and / or iOS that would replace Carmit yielded no outcome.
Unless you guys lead me to a better solution, I think I'll stick with my iPhone to study Ancient Hebrew.
Thank you very much in advance.
Comments
Biblical Hebrew with IOS
Hello.
I am a professor of biblical languages and I hope this information will be helpful to you.
It doesn't matter which voice you use for pronouncing Hebrew. The mechanism for how Hebrew is fed to the voice is hendled within the features of IOS that interact with the Hebrew voices. IOS is designed to read modern Hebrew, not biblical Hebrew; so there are marks in biblical Hebrew that will not be read to you by any TTS voice you usee. Likewise the braille systems available to IOS (be it Mac or Iphone) are designed for use with modern Hebrew, so you would see a lot of X#### where the number signs represent Unicode values for Hebrew symbols that the system does not recognize.
There will not be much difference between Mac and Iphone performance--they are using the same systems where language access is concerned.
On the PC side, these same access problems exist in NVDA, which also runs on the same language platform that IOS uses. JAWS has better access to Hebrew, though Carmit is the only Hebrew voice available. JAWS does include a somewhat wider variety of characters in its pronunciation and I have a downloadable braille table with full support for biblical Hebrew characters in braille. This will not help in IOS devices and I am sorry to write this kind of answer.
As you see, much responsibility also lies with the developers of text to ensure proper language tagging.
I am happy to talk further if you wish..
Hello, Thank you very much…
Hello,
Thank you very much for the response.
It is quite discouraging to read that there is no effort towards developing TTS voices for Biblical Hebrew.
I am afraid I will not be able to take the Braille approach due to the exorbitant cost of the Braille equipments.
Assuming you are blind, I would like to congratulate you on becoming a professor of a field where blind accessibility is scarce. I also would like to hear more about your journey towards becoming a Biblical Hebrew expert, if you please to tell of course.
Kind regards,
~Sadik
Hi
Hi, I am speaking hebrew the problem of Voice Over that the Hebrew Tts doesn't read a gramerd text. In braille it's even wors because that there is't Libluies table and it's problematic untill apple pull the new fixed version to show hebrew braille correctly. On the Mack side the hebrew doesn't read at all, I gave up on it and use Jaws 3 years all reddy
Biblical Hebrew
I am a braille reader and I would like to find a A course in braille to study biblical Hebrew. Where should I look? To learn it.
Thank you in advance