Afrikaans Language not available in Rotor Settings
DavidJ1001 opened this issue · 8 comments
Looks like the Afrikaans works in the ESpeak app but the language packs do not seem to be available when choosing Afrikaans for the Rotor Language settings.
There seems to be an issue when going into the App Store on my iPhone 8 with the espeak installed. When opening the App Store app, something crashes and my Voice / Language settings are reset. I needed to uninstall the espeak app to be able to make use of the App Store again.
Hello,
I can't reproduce the AppStore problem, but for your language issue, I am fairly certain this is a VoiceOver problem, or rather a design flaw.
Is Afrikaans available as an iOS language?
If not, the situation is the same as Serbian.
You can add the language to VoiceOver, but can't use it. This is because Voiceover normally speaks interface elements such as buttons, links, or punctuation/emoji in the language of the current synthesizer, but for our languages, there is no localization to use, so the voice is unusable.
I've asked Apple to re consider this and use English as fallback if no localization is available so that the voice is at least still usable for reading texts in our languages, and they replied that they'll look into it, but my guess is that this probably won't happen so soon as iOS 16 is pretty much finalized.
I don't know if something can be done about this on ESpeak's side, if yes that would of course be nice, but I suspect not since the voice for such languages is in fact perfectly usable not only in the ESpeak app, but in other apps that use system TTS such as VoiceDream, and this is only a VoiceOver problem.
I think this is indeed an Apple problem, the languages they don't themselves support don't show up properly in the list for either VoiceOver or spoken content, but if you look in another app that supports text to speech, like VoiceDream Reader you can see and select the missing languages so I'm assuming the Espeak app is doing everything correctly here.
Given this new speech framework is very new and I would imagine one of the reasons Apple created it is to support more languages it's definitely worth reporting this to them - both to the accessibility address and as a developer in the feedback hub.
A small note for those who use Mac OS, this issue doesn't happen there at all.
You can perfectly add and use any ESpeak language.
This is quite good news, as this could simply be an iOS bug that will hopefully get resolved in the future.
In latest build for iOS (1.08) I implemented a language chooser for VoiceOver. Sadly, languages listed in "all" section (including Afrikaans, and Lithuanian from #15) are very poorly supported by VoiceOver and entire system. And I can't do more that system permit.
@DavidJ1001 it appears that iOS 16.3 fixed this, at least on my side.
Serbian was previously unsupported, but in iOS 16.3, I am able to choose it in VoiceOver, as long as the language is enabled in the ESpeak app in the VoiceOver languages section.
There are still some bugs with this for my language (unrelated to ESpeak), but hopefully future versions improve this further and hopefully for Afrikaans it works better.