(no subject)

[soc_puppet]

My current fandom, Miraculous Ladybug, originated in France and takes place in Paris. While there is an English dub available, the majority of the fandom uses the French name for one of the main character's superhero identity - most likely because the French version was available before the English dub was, and fandom adopted the French name early on. (The other superhero's name was always in English.)

The problem with this? The superhero's French name is Chat Noir; in French, it's pronounced shah.

Is there a way to indicate to screenreaders how a specific word is supposed to be pronounced? Or that it's in a different language? A bit of HTML or something? A possible skin on AO3, or a way for me to make one myself? I personally am planning to stick to the English name either way, but I'd love if there was at least an option to give the rest of the fandom.

Edit: To clear things up a bit: I wanted to know if there's a way to indicate for other people's screenreaders how a specific words is pronounced, or if it should be considered in a different language. So someone posting something here to Dreamwidth, or on AO3, can write it "Chat", but a screenreader will either read it as the French pronunciation or as "Cat".

It's entirely likely that I'm looking for a difficult solution when an easy one will do, or where one isn't needed (I'm sure most folks using screenreaders figure out what's what pretty quick, and again, I'm sticking to the English name myself), but I thought it might be worth asking.

Comments

[jazzyjj]

Most screen readers have voice dictionaries, which let you customize the pronunciations of things. I don't quite remember how to do this under Windows since I haven't used it for several years now, and I rarely had to do it anyway. But I have since switched over to Apple products, and both Mac OS and iOS have this functionality built right in. I've not yet tried it on iOS, but on the Mac I have right option-P set up to go into the voice dictionary. If you need further instructions on how to accomplish this, just leave me a private message or reply here.

[soc_puppet]

Shoot, I think I was not clear enough here. I'm sighted and don't use/need a screenreader, and was hoping there was a possible solution that could be implemented on my end, or by other sighted fans.

Really, this is probably more a case of me looking for a hard solution when an easy one is already there; it's just that the majority of the fandom either hasn't realized this might be a problem, or doesn't care.

Oh! Thank you very much for the offer, though; it's very much appreciated ♥

[caramarie]

I don't know how it behaves if the screenreader doesn't have the right dictionaries installed, but you can indicate the language of specific words (paragraphs, pages, etc) in the html. So here you could wrap the word Chat in a span with the attribute lang="fr" and that tells the screenreader it should be pronounced as French. So < span lang="fr" >Chat< /span > (but without spaces).

[soc_puppet]

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for, thank you!

[alexseanchai]

YOU CAN DO THAT?!?!?

I will never remember to type all that—contrast &mdash; for em dashes and Chlo&eacute; for Chloé—but it's an easy search-replace. I just gotta remember to do it before posting stuff.

... probably only bothering for stuff going on AO3, though. Tumblr only plays nice for me with HTML when in browser, not app, and Tumblr does not like my tablet's browser, and frankly I don't trust Tumblr not to strip shit out without informing me anyway.

[soc_puppet]

LOL, while I was writing that post about this very issue, I was wondering to myself, "Is it possible that there's HTML somewhere that can just go [Language = French] Chat [/Language] and solve all or some of my problems? That seems like it's something that should already exist..." To find out that it does, and in almost exactly that form, is rather vindicating!

Yeah, ditto Only AO3 (And Dreamwidth); Tumblr is such a pain for accessibility. I finally find out how to add alt text to the actual images, and it turns out it only works if I do it with the main images in the Photo post option and there has to be more than one? Argh! *shakes fist at Tumblr*

[alexseanchai]

EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK ON AO3.

...at least we know this now, rather than when I just spent time polishing up a work of 3K+ words as opposed to 3 sentences? *sulk*

[sylvaine]

Yeah, AO3 is stupid about inline CSS, it's awful >_

[jadelennox]

Depends on the screen reader. Some of them do a good job. NVDA has trouble with multilingual text depending on the voice syntehsizer, for example.

VoiceOver (the built in one on iOS and macs) does a pretty good job with multilingual out of the box, as I recall from testing it.

[cesy]

They should be willing to add this one to the whitelist, though, given what it's for - worth dropping them a support request.

[sylvaine]

Do they actually have a whitelist for specific CSS? None of the stuff I've tried to use (say, for image resizing) has ever worked, and they've been extremely uninterested in fixing any accessibility issues I've mentioned in the past.

[soc_puppet]

Urgh. If I weren't already over-booked with projects, I'd look into volunteering to fix that shit. Instead, I think it's time I start researching the folks up for vote to see which, if any, support accessibility improvement for the site.

[cesy]

There is a whitelist in the code, yes, and a lot of people in the org who want to support accessibility, so it's worth trying again - you may have been unlucky with the specific person handling your request previously.