I've noticed this on Mac Os and have done a google search and come up short. The * or "Star key", Shift eight, is supposed to represent the asterisk when it comes to things such as emphasizing something, or preventing a swear word from being figured out. However, here's my question. If you use a Star, you hear Alex, or your prefred voice say, star, as in I f** texted the wrong person. However, I've also heard things be written as I asterisk forgot the bread asterisk, so my question is, is someone simply writing the word asterisk, knowing visually that it will be noticed that the word or phrase is emphasized, or, because * symbol is used, the Mac OS simply just uses star instead of the word asterisk which means the same thing? I bet I confused so many of you with this, so let's see who took their IQ pills and can solve this riddle. :)
Comments
Could be many factors
It's difficult to comment without seeing the text you heard read as "asterisk", but it's possible that the writer used one of the many star-shaped symbols in Unicode other than *.
* vs star
Are you asking if people sometimes type out the word, A s t e r i s k, or the symbol, "*", in place of crude language? Or are you asking why sometimes a screen reader will call it a S T A R, and sometimes an A S T E R I S K ...?
Speech Synthesizers and Key/Value Pairs
Here's a fun one to try. With the Alex voice, type Shift-8 a few times, read the current line, then Option-Delete.
This could be the way the key-value pair is coded in the speech synthesizer utterance dictionary. I have my VO settings to speak when deleting a word with Option-Delete. When the character is typed or read by line, it is pronounced "star". When deleted, it is pronounced "asterisk".
I'd try this with different synthesizers to see what the results are.
Crazy Coding
Kevin Shaw has an interesting point. I don't use a Mac, but the setup I use has a few discrepancies in pronunciation of characters, depending on whether it's doing a "say all" reading or in a mode that speaks all characters or just some characters, or going letter by letter with the arrow keys. There doesn't seem to be any way to fix some of the pronunciations, such as sometimes calling an exclamation mark "bang," so I just live with it and fix what I can in the screen reader settings.