We have set up a series of YouTube videos that include:
Text resizing, font style changes and line spacing. This video has no audio but shows how a user can select the magnifier on the toolbar to enlarge text without resizing the graphics – this tends to allow for more readable text when compared to zooming using the browser Ctrl+ which also enlarges the graphics. However, this feature does not work when Flash has been used within a webpage or fonts have fixed sizes or styles. The same applies to increased line spacing which is also demonstrated.
The second video demonstrates how the A.I.Type word prediction works as well as spell checking when writing a blog using WordPress. Use the HTML mode when working in the edit box rather than the Visual mode and then you will also be able to use the text to speech to aid proof reading.
Seb has enabled the AIType word prediciton with keyboard access and text to speech for simple text boxes in his recent updates to the toolbar for both Arabic and English.
The Word prediction button needs to be selected before entering text. It is possible to use the ‘esc’key to ignore a prediction and close the dialog box or use Ctrl+Alt and the word position as a number to insert the required word.
Word Prediction in WordPress
We have found that the prediction and text to speech work with HTML views of text boxes in WordPress and Blogger but not the Visual mode which overrides the ATbar.
The text needs to be highlighted before the text to speech button is selected. There may be a pause before you hear the speech.
Magnus has just updated his ATbar WordPress plugin so it now supports English, Arabic and the Marketplace toolbars. You just select the version you want and if it is a marketplace one, just paste the install link from the toolbar viewing page in the marketplace and it will load the toolbar just like the normal ATbar.
From a three year old slideshare presentation by Ahmed Mekkawy on “FOSS: Technologies, Communities, and the Society“, it is clear that there is interest in the current status of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in Arab societies.
A recent FOSS survey is seeking to learn more about user engagement with the open source community. It has been produced by ‘a regional research team affiliated with the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the School of Business of the American University in Cairo, in collaboration with Ma3bar, the Arab Support Center for Free & Open Source Software at the University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon.’
It would be wonderful if the results of the survey could provide us with more information about Arabic open source assistive technologies but for the moment just knowing about the availability of any products would be helpful. (Sadly the survey ends with a Captcha so it is not screen reader accessible.
Despite searching and contacting individuals accross the area we have struggled to find FOSS assistive technology programs that have already been developed in the Arabic language. Please leave comments to tell us about any you might have found.
Miftaah on Ma3bar.org offers Araic translations for information about several portable apps. Their range of apps includes office, browser, email, PDF readers and VLC. However, I discovered that although the menus may be in Arabic (as we have achieved with our Access Tools pendrive menu (version 2) the actual programs are still those available in English from Portable apps).
ArabEyes has links to a number of start up projects including the Duali spell checker and Khotot, a set of open TTF Arabic fonts. More information is available about the latest release of the bold version of KacstOne font v5.0.
Sadly many of the other sites are dated and the code is no longer being updated.
The Firefox browser is available in Arabic but when you start to look for ‘add-ons’ you immediately return to a US version from the Arabic page – search on ‘Arabic’ and the results are mainly linked to keyboards, dictionaries and translations. The spell checker uses the same database as that used in all the browsers and ATbar – Ayaspell based on Hunspell – also available as the Ayaspell project from Source Forge.
Zekr have produced a “Free Open Source Quran Study Software for Windows, Linux and Mac OS” that is available in several languages including Arabic with audio support but thre does not appear any support to update the work on espeak in Arabic although it is happening in European Languages.
Perhaps the place for professionals to find out more is the ArabNet as this crosses boundaries when it comes to the commercial and open source world. It hosted the ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut and as Mike Butcher from TechCrunch said:
“The MENA (Middle East North Africa) region’s largest digital event has been expanded to 5 days featuring speakers, panels, workshops, a startup competition and about 1,500 delegates. In a sign the the Arab business world is really getting switched on to tech these days, there’s even a hackathon-style developer event during the conference. I daresay there will be some interesting startups for TechCrunch to unearth there.”
So hopefully you will join us in the quest for open source and freely available Arabic language assistive technology. Here is a short video from the Mada Center in Qatar about building the awareness around assistive technology and accessibility in Arabic.
It is thanks to the Mada Center that we have been able to explore the development of open source assistive technologies in Arabic and the latest version of the ATbar in Arabic has occurred.
We really would like to receive feedback for the English ATKit version of the ATBar as we would like to begin to make this version available to all.
Please put any issues you find on Github ATBar repository as Seb is trying to get all the bugs ironed out before launching. Please also be aware that some websites do not work with the toolbar due to Flash and other features that cannot be accessed.
The Arabic script is cursive and we have been exploring difficulties with accurate online spell checking. Fadwa Mohamad has kindly shared her knowledge about some of the issues that arise for those with dyslexia when it comes to the way Arabic characters are linked. Arabic has 28 letters to represent 34 phonemes and we have already discussed the issues of vowels and diacritics. Now we have learnt there is the thorny problem that only 22 of the 28 letters have two way connectors. The 6 remaining letters can only be joined in one way – so an Arabic word can contain one of more spaces. This means a word using some of these 6 letters, that can only be joined up in one way, may be divided in several places.
The other problem of note is that capital letters are not used in Arabic, so once again it may not be easy to see or work out where word boundaries occur. This along with the odd spacing obviously causes concerns for some readers, but may also be one reason why a spell checker can appear to gobble letters when it tries to correct a word!
To add to these issues the articles ‘the’,’a’ or ‘an’ in English tend to be joined to the following word in Arabic – so those who can read Arabic will recognise the letters ‘AL’ or “Arabic: الـ, also transliterated as ul- and in some cases il- and el- ” according to Wikipedia. The reader has to also work out whether the ‘AL’ will be silent or voiced in some cases which impacts on text to speech engines and the lack of spacing can affect spell checking.
Finally Arabic letters may be formed in different ways depending on their position in the word. So a shape may change from its isolated form to one that is different when seen as the initial letter in the word or the medial one or even the final one! This is how arabic-course.com describe the issue.
The work to discover how we can overcome the letter gobbling spell checking and the mispronouncing speech synthesis continues!
Over the summer the team have been investigating the issues around TTS in Arabic and Edrees Abdu Alkinani has completed his MSc report which has made interesting reading as it summarises many of the findings. It was noted that Arabic TTS synthesis did not have the early successes of European languages due to the limitations in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the complexities of using diacritics as substitutes for vowel combinations. However, with the advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) plus automatic diacrtizers progress is being developed progress has been made in the commercial world where there are now several attractive Arabic synthesised voices as will be seen in an evaluation to follow.
Issue No 1 – Lack of diacritics on web pages.
The Learning Resource - Arabic language
English speakers may wonder at the reasons for the difficulties with Arabic TTS, but it does not take more than a cursory glance at the written language to understand that having 14 different diacritic marks with 34 phonemes, 28 of which are consonants, and only six vowels that the combinations may cause TTS problems. As Eedris pointed out… ” كُتُبْ ” means books and ” كَتَبَ ” means wrote – the only difference you will notice is the type of marks used above the letters.
TEFL world wiki - English vowel sounds
This is compared to the English basic 12 vowel sounds with no accents or diacritics even though we may complain about our odd pronunciation of some written words – rough, cough, though, thorough and through – at least some of the letters are different and we cannot leave any out. Yet this is what is happening with written Arabic on the web – the diacritics are being left out….. Number one problem for a text to speech engine.
Issue No 2 – The differences between the way the TTS is developed and the resulting output.
Research has shown that although there are now a few text to speech engines they are commercial and even these vary in quality. The MBROLA project links to work carried out in the open source world, but at present it has been impossible to achieve success with the code offered in the various repositories for evaluation purposes. However, Eedris has supplied the team with these comments based on the demonstrators offered by the various organisations and companies.
MBROLA project MBROLA has two Arabic voices as a recorded audio file. The speed of speech is slow, and the quality poor. Moreover, the pronunciation is hard to understand – even for a an Arabic speaker. The stress pattern is often incorrect and the distinction between words unclear. The most difficult words to understand have letters like, “ أ” ‘A’, “ ض” ‘th’, “ ل” ‘L’.
Acapela Group Acapela offers two good quality male and female voices. The pronunciation for words with and without diacritic marks is understandable, with accurate stress patterns. There are three letters which appear to cause some difficulty “ ج” ‘j’, “ ا’ ‘a’, “ ك” ‘k’. The pronunciation of numbers in all situations is good.
Nuance Vocalizer Nuance provide a very clear male voice with clear pronunciation. The only problem is that the system produces speech without taking into account diacritics. Words which have letters like “ ق” ‘q’, “ ش” ‘sh’, and “ ض” ‘th’ may cause problems but the speed of speech used in the online demo is good. Numbers are not clearly enunciated due to the lack of diacritics.
Loquendo Loquendo offer a recording of a male and female voice on their site as the Arabic voice has only be available since October 2010. The system has good sound quality clear speech. The example on the website has diacritic marks but as it is a small sample it is hard to judge the overall quality but it appears to be good.
Issue No 3 – Further Development of eSpeak with Arabic.
The current version of MBROLA does not appear to run with the arabic voice files and there seem to be very few people who have had success. So this is work in progress…
There are several spell checkers available as open source applications and much has been said about the quality of their output in English but there appears to be very little research when linked to the Arabic language. However, Hunspell is used with many word processing packages.
Seb has succeeded in getting it to work with ATbar vers 2 which means that the Kit version is now almost in beta and there is the beginnings of an Arabic spell checker.
ATbar is now available as a WordPress Plugin. It is simple to install and allows the website owner to select whether the toolbar is persistent or not (active on all pages).
Future versions look to include the option to exclude the toolbar on specific pages as well as a widget (sidebar) option for greater flexibility.
Miftaah on Ma3bar.org 
