moderated Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS
EmilDsmith@...
Hi everyone,
My name is Emil Smith and I am taking a Spanish class for college this upcoming semester. I’m curious if anyone has any info on how this work, the area I’m curious about is how to deal with entering Spanish characters for homework assignments. If anyone has previous experience with this or has any tips, that would appreciated, thanks!
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Cristóbal
You can configure a Spanish language keyboard in the regional settings of your PC and enable the alt plus shift command to rotate among keyboards. Unless I plan to write in Spanish for a good chunk though, I’ll just use the word processing short cut for Office of pressing the control plus ‘ (apostrophy) then the corresponding vowel. This will give me the accented A, E, I, O, or U. For the ñ, it’s control plus shift plus ` (grauv) key then n. You can also use the numbpad sequences. With the numlock set to on, Alt plus 1-6-4 gives you the ñ. Alt plus 1-3-0 gives you é. Alt plus 1-6-0 is á and so on. Don’t forget too, that in Spanish, you also have the inverted question mark and exclamation mark.
From: main@jfw.groups.io <main@jfw.groups.io> On Behalf Of EmilDsmith@...
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 1:35 PM To: jfw@groups.io Subject: Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS
Hi everyone,
My name is Emil Smith and I am taking a Spanish class for college this upcoming semester. I’m curious if anyone has any info on how this work, the area I’m curious about is how to deal with entering Spanish characters for homework assignments. If anyone has previous experience with this or has any tips, that would appreciated, thanks!
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Ashleigh Piccinino
Hola, You can enter characters you need by turning your keyboard language to “U.S. International (written as U.S-I for my shortcut.” At least, I think that’s what it was called when I used Windows Vista. I’m pretty sure your instructor will have better knowledge of how to set up your keyboard/what it’s new layout will be called. However, I’ve heard that the CTRL key and shift will put your keyboard into the mode I’m describing. After you set the layout up, just press these keys together to get back to your regular U.S. keyboard. Another press of the keystroke takes you back to U.S.-I. I don’t know how to set that up for any languages, though. My teacher gave me instructions on this. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any more help, but here’s what I do know about the new keyboard layout. Different keys do different things, and the accent key actually works. The apostrophe key turns into one which can perform accented letters. JAWS might say something like sidila or something when this is pressed alone. Keep in mind, I don’t have mine set up right now. However, if you wanted to make an accented i—Spanish is common for doing this/accented e’s too--, press the sidilla/apostrophe key followed by the letter you’re using (our example is I and/or e). it would put the accent on the letter in question, and that’s how you make accented letters. If you need that funny little thing over any n, I think you press your shift key along with your accent key, located to the left of one on the numbers row. This is with U.S.-I still enabled, keep in mind. Press your n now, and that should give you that specific sound which is used on words like ninio, I think. It’s been a while since I’ve taken online Spanish, though so can’t give a definite answer on how that n thing was formed. I really didn’t like U.S.-I and was glad when I could use a normal U.S. keyboard again. Espero tienes un classe excellente de Espa!nal. that’s my best impression for, “I hope you have an excellent Spanish class.” Make sure your screen reader can speak Spanish as well—the voices for JAWS can switch if they find Spanish characters. Let me know how your course goes by e-mailing apiccinino@... or sending to the group. One more thing, hablar and all its forms is written with an h not just the a. however, it’s pronounced ablar—obviously with Spanish vocalization of aw on the a. Adios, Antonia – This was my Spanish name in High School but didn’t have one for college, so sad.
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From: main@jfw.groups.io <main@jfw.groups.io> on behalf of EmilDsmith@... <EmilDsmith@...>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 3:35:27 PM To: jfw@groups.io Subject: Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS Hi everyone,
My name is Emil Smith and I am taking a Spanish class for college this upcoming semester. I’m curious if anyone has any info on how this work, the area I’m curious about is how to deal with entering Spanish characters for homework assignments. If anyone has previous experience with this or has any tips, that would appreciated, thanks!
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Emil,
Presuming you're using MS-Word to do your assignments, it is easy to insert individual characters related to most common foreign (using English as the base) languages with a series of keystrokes. See the search results from, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=MS-Word+foreign+characters, for the tutorial of your choice. If you happen to know the name (or a significant part of it) for a given character you're looking for you can use the Windows built-in Character Map program pretty effectively with a screen reader, too. If you enter enough of the character name in the search field you can often limit the returned list to one, but this works much better for special characters such as "Registered," "Degree," etc., than it does for letters with diacritics. -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1803, Build 17134 Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~ Mark Twain
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James Malone
Hi Brian, James Malone here. I’m afraid that Emil has set his preferences to no mail, but has selected to go on line to pull his answers off the web site from the list. He is one of my students, so what I can do is forward this message to him. You can however email him off list if you like and explain this as well. I’m sure he’ll want to hear from you. I also explained that this list is not too busy, and he won’t get slammed by a bunch of emails in regards to any issues that doesn’t pertain to him depending on where he has his email settings. He was receiving daily digest, but decided to go with no mail. If you can please! Explain that the list has several ways to give information to him with several kinds of control without overloading his email? Thanks for your help. James
From: main@jfw.groups.io [mailto:main@jfw.groups.io] On Behalf Of Brian Vogel
Emil, Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1803, Build 17134 Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~ Mark Twain
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Andre Polykanine <andre@...>
Hello Emil,
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I might sound a bit too harsh to everyone (sorry about that), but if you really want to learn a language (Spanish in your case), please don't listen to those suggestions like pressing Alt + numpad keys, using Word keystrokes, and so on, and so forth. They are completely useless unless you plan to make a couple assignments and give up with it. I speak quite a number of languages (seven, to be precise), and I suggest you to do just one thing: add the Spanish keyboard layout, learn it and switch to it whenever you need to type in Spanish. then you'll also need a Spanish TTS (voice) to have correct speech output. If you use Eloquence or Vocalizer Expressive, basically JAWS should switch languages automagically, though it doesn't do it very well because it's extremely complicated to detect what language it is, unless specified: both English and Spanish have Latin alphabet, and there are plenty of Spanish words with no diacritics in them, so you can't say to your PC just "Interpret these characters as English, and those characters as Spanish". Inspite of what I said, voice switching seems to work reasonably well in Office apps and in web browsers. Good luck in your learning! -- With best regards from Ukraine, Andre Skype: menelion_elensule Twitter (English only): @AndrePolykanine
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From: EmilDsmith@... <EmilDsmith@...> To: jfw@groups.io Date created: , 11:35:27 PM Subject: Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS Hi everyone, My name is Emil Smith and I am taking a Spanish class for college this upcoming semester. I’m curious if anyone has any info on how this work, the area I’m curious about is how to deal with entering Spanish characters for homework assignments. If anyone has previous experience with this or has any tips, that would appreciated, thanks!
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On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 12:13 pm, Andre Polykanine wrote:
I might sound a bit too harsh to everyone (sorry about that), but if you really want to learn a language (Spanish in your case), pleaseI would presume that the original poster is someone who's about to take beginning Spanish, where relatively little writing is involved. It requires quite the feat of memory to get down an alternate language keyboard layout in your head when you're just starting out, so it really depends on what the needs are. If one intends to write, really write, any significant volume of material in a language that uses diacritics I'd say that you're 100% correct. If someone has a few assignments that require them to write a few sentences, most of the words in which will not require diacritics, then using the CTRL+ technique to get them where needed makes far, far more sense than trying to master a second language keyboard layout at the outset; that would come later when writing at length in a language is required. Of course should one choose to try to master a foreign keyboard because one simply wants to that's another story. For those interested, the following works at least up through Outlook 2010, and I'd have to believe beyond: https://word.tips.net/T001680_Inserting_Foreign_Characters.html -- Brian - Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1803, Build 17134 Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~ Mark Twain
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Cristóbal
I work in the interpreting and translation field and depending on what I'm
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doing, the alt plus X, Y or Z or control plus apostrophe then the vowl works well enough for me. If I'm typing longer blocks of text in Spanish, then of course, I'll switch over to the Spanish language keyboard, but for the odd accent or ñ and to not get mixed up with what keyboard I was last on and maybe end up having Jaws read all weird down the road, it's no great inconvenience to numlock on and punch out the alt plus . . . So yes, I say, listen to the suggestions provided to you and figure out what works best in what situation for yourself.
-----Original Message-----
From: main@jfw.groups.io [mailto:main@jfw.groups.io] On Behalf Of Andre Polykanine Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2018 8:45 AM To: main@jfw.groups.io Subject: Re: Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS Hello Emil, I might sound a bit too harsh to everyone (sorry about that), but if you really want to learn a language (Spanish in your case), please don't listen to those suggestions like pressing Alt + numpad keys, using Word keystrokes, and so on, and so forth. They are completely useless unless you plan to make a couple assignments and give up with it. I speak quite a number of languages (seven, to be precise), and I suggest you to do just one thing: add the Spanish keyboard layout, learn it and switch to it whenever you need to type in Spanish. then you'll also need a Spanish TTS (voice) to have correct speech output. If you use Eloquence or Vocalizer Expressive, basically JAWS should switch languages automagically, though it doesn't do it very well because it's extremely complicated to detect what language it is, unless specified: both English and Spanish have Latin alphabet, and there are plenty of Spanish words with no diacritics in them, so you can't say to your PC just "Interpret these characters as English, and those characters as Spanish". Inspite of what I said, voice switching seems to work reasonably well in Office apps and in web browsers. Good luck in your learning! -- With best regards from Ukraine, Andre Skype: menelion_elensule Twitter (English only): @AndrePolykanine ------------ Original message ------------ From: EmilDsmith@... <EmilDsmith@...> To: jfw@groups.io Date created: , 11:35:27 PM Subject: Question about learning foreign languages with JAWS Hi everyone, My name is Emil Smith and I am taking a Spanish class for college this upcoming semester. I’m curious if anyone has any info on how this work, the area I’m curious about is how to deal with entering Spanish characters for homework assignments. If anyone has previous experience with this or has any tips, that would appreciated, thanks!
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