Announcing the Availability of Language Translation on the AppleVis Website

By AppleVis, 18 November, 2025

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Dear AppleVis Community,

Since our 2024 acquisition by Be My Eyes, making AppleVis available in more languages and to more people has been at the top of our wish list. While it took us some time to find the right solution, we are very excited to announce that as of today (11/18/2025), AppleVis offers machine translation of the website and all written content thanks to Google Translate.

The Language Translate widget is located immediately past the Main Menu in the tab order. For the time being, there is a link that says, "Translate this page." When activated, a user will be taken to a modal with a disclaimer about the service. Once accepted, a combo box of available languages will be displayed; with cursor focus placed inside the combo box, simply navigate to your desired language and the website will be translated in real-time as you browse.

Important Notes:

Translations of the AppleVis website and any written content herein are machine-generated and provided by the third-party Google Translate service. While we wish it weren't so, these translations may contain errors.
Google Translate supports over 100 languages. To try and keep the language selection process as simple as possible, we have enabled support for what we believe are likely to be the most-used languages. If your native language is not in the list, please let us know and we will enable support for it if available.
If the language translation feature has been activated during a user session, screen reader focus may automatically be placed near or in the language translation combo box when a page is loaded. This issue will be our immediate priority for resolution.
it is currently necessary to select your preferred language every time you start a new session on the website. We will investigate an option to remember a user's language selection across visits, if available.
All content submissions to AppleVis, including posts and comments, must be in English. We recommend ChatGPT as a free and accessible way to translate content from your native language into English, if needed.

We would love to hear your feedback about our language translation implementation. To help us keep feedback organized in one place, please use this topic to share your experiences, suggestions, and/or report any issues.

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Comments

Found it

Did not care where it was place, kept activating it by mistake. I expect the web page to open fast and allow me to browse without issues. Nice feature but hope is not going to keep affecting me. JAWS 26 and windows 10.

Workaround

Hi Holger,

Our apologies for the screen reader focus issues. We have put in place a temporary workaround for this issue until a permanent resolution can be implemented.

Provide ability to translate manually

Hi team,
Could you at least talk to BeMyEyes about starting a community initiative for providing manual translation of the articles?

How this works usually with other projects:

You provide machine translation as is.
You open a GitHub repository (either a monolith or one repo per language). You commit your articles, optionally already machine-translated.
People from the community speaking those languages translate the articles manually.
You either write a tiny automation script or verify yourselves that the formatting is not broken, then upload to Applevis (can be automated with GitHub actions).
Those articles are marked as manually translated.

Thanks for considering it. I'm ready to help and/or consult, if needed.

Michael

No problem but in the feature text before you release it. Forgot to say, long live cats. That is saying how unhappy I was. Long live cats.

RE: Provide Ability to Translate Manually

Hi Andre,

Thank you both for your suggestion and your insight as to how it could be implemented. While I don't currently see AppleVis being able to take on manual content translation because of the complexities involved and the ever-changing nature of the landscape and information, we appreciate all feedback and will consider every suggestion as our website continues to evolve.

Will This Work in Braille Too?

I have yet to find this on the website, but am wondering if the language translation will support Braille as well as speech or is this something that is in the pipeline? I took Spanish, Latin and German in school and am looking forward to trying this out.

Ekaj

I think they took it out, bugs. Did not work well and made me mad. Long live cats.

Confused as it is still there.

From the top of the page scroll down and below search then main menu the next thing is translate page which is a link. At least that is where and how it shows on windows 11.

11/19/2025 Update

Hi all,

I wanted to take a moment to provide a short update on developments since our initial post, as well as to answer some questions:

Braille Support: In our testing, we found that screen readers correctly read out translated text in the appropriate voice for the language selected. Given that screen readers correctly render the translated text, we believe braille support should perform similarly. If you find otherwise, please definitely let us know.
The intended workflow for our language translation widget is a combo box where users can select their preferred language, and for it not to get in the way if you don't want or need to use it. Unfortunately, we identified an issue where cursor focus was automatically being placed in the combo box to select a language every time a page was loaded; potentially causing unintended switching of a user's language. Upon investigation, we found that this issue was not specifically related to screen reader support and that it occurred for sighted users as well. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused, and a fix has already been identified and will be released to production soon. As a temporary workaround, we adjusted the display of our language translation widget to first require activating the "Translate This Page" link (which is next in the tab order after the Main Menu) and accepting the modal that displays.
Based on feedback, we have enabled support for all 100+ languages that Google Translate supports.

@Michael

The current translation widget you guys have up and running is kind of doing the same thing the original bug, that you mentioned above, was doing. Whenever the webpage is loaded, or refreshed, VO immediately locks focus on it. If one is tapping around, or exploring by touch, it is very easy to activate the widget, and accidentally switch languages. This is on iOS, of course. I have not tried this on my Windows 11 laptop, so the experience admittedly might be a little different.

@Brian

Hi Brian,

I am sorry about this and appreciate you letting us know that you are seeing the issue as well on your end. We thought we had a complete fix identified (and indeed it works in our testing environment), but unfortunately there are still some issues with focus and the combo box in production. For now, it has been reverted back to being behind the disclaimer modal so as to prevent unintended activations.

THANKS FOR THIS

THANKS FOR ALL YOU DO TO IMPROVE THIS WEBSITE AND MAKING SURE ITS ACCESSABLE FOR ALLEven though I don’t speak any other languages besides English, I feel that translation of a website as resourceful to this community as apple vis will only open the doors to more discovery which is better in the long run!