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Dash symbols should be passed through to the synthesizer if not spoken as words #3740

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nvaccessAuto opened this issue Dec 29, 2013 · 8 comments

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@nvaccessAuto
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Reported by k_kolev1985 on 2013-12-29 11:01
At least some (if not most) speech synthesizers are designed to make pauses when they detect dash symbols (as symbols, and not as text). Because in the natural speech, one of the reasons to insert a dash symbol is exactly for that - to make a pause in the reader's speech. At present however, NVDA is set to replace the non-spoken at the current punctuation level symbols with a space. And in most cases, this is OK. In most, but not in all. And the dash symbol is one such case. I think that NVDA should be set (through the default english symbols dictionary) to not replace the dashes (all kinds of them) with a space, but to pass them through directly as they are to the synthesizer. I think it can relatively easy be done (I think it is done for the colon symbol and some others), but I don't know how to do it for our bulgarian symbols dictionary for NVDA and I think that it should be done globally for all dictionaries, via the default english symbols dictionary. And as I wrote above, it should be for all types of dashes available in the symbols dictionary, and not only for the normal one (-).

@nvaccessAuto
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Comment 1 by jteh on 2014-01-07 00:55
My concern with doing this for all dashes is that many synthesisers would start speaking the dash as a word, not just inserting a pause. In English, a single dash in the middle of a word is a hyphen; there should never be a pause for this. I certainly agree we should consider doing it for the em dash (-- or —). I've also seen this written as a dash with spaces before and after (" - "), which is apparently incorrect usage, but we should probably handle it.

@nvaccessAuto
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Comment 2 by zahari_bgr (in reply to comment 1) on 2014-01-07 01:36
Replying to jteh:
Hi,
Isn't it a synthesizer's problem, not NVDA's?
What you are saying is true and it is valid for Bulgarian too.
However, I think NVDA should not strip characters involved in intonation, cause many people reley on it (having punctuation set to none).
Or may be there should be another symbol level - "Strip", or may be "Pass to synthesizer" or something like that.
May be "Pass to synthesizer" is better, cause it will not involve changing existing behavior.

@nvaccessAuto
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Comment 3 by jteh on 2014-01-07 01:42
The point is that dash is not always associated with intonation; e.g. the hyphen.

@zahyur
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zahyur commented Aug 19, 2016

Hi,
Is this fixed? I think it is. Or it isn't? CC @k-kolev1985

@k-kolev1985
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Yes, it is fixed.

@jcsteh
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jcsteh commented Aug 20, 2016

The "–" (n-dash) is passed through, but other dashes aren't at this stage due to my concern above.

@k-kolev1985
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Yes, but now the user can specify this on his own if he wants to. And that is what I've done for myself.

@jcsteh
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jcsteh commented Aug 21, 2016

Okay. Closing, since reporter is satisfied. :)

@jcsteh jcsteh closed this as completed Aug 21, 2016
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