In the Arab world, we have about 8 million blind people, and in the whole world about 39 million [based on WHO]. Blind/Visually impaired using text-to-speech engines to speak each letter, word, and message on their devices with many supported languages. In devices that work with Android OS, Google embedded their own TTS without supporting Arabic language/voices! We aim with this campaign to provide some numbers/statistics about blind users who use Android and would like to support Arabic voices in Google TTS.
About the campaign
The campaign started with writing comments on the page of the app (Google Text to Speech) and point that this app doesn’t support Arabic even though we have a lot of Arab users using Android smartphones from the blind and visually impaired!
The second step is filling out this Arabic simple form that aims to give simple statistics about users who are using Android devices and the expensive alternatives that are used by them to provide those numbers to Google! Of course, the Arab blind community could help with supporting Arabic language/voices if possible to make this happen!
The problem
The problem doesn’t include just the Arab blind at all, even the developers of blind apps have problems developing apps and solutions for the Arab blind including me! As you might read about TTS and the stored voices feature that has been applied to the Swift Braille soft keyboard project because of the lack of support of the Arabic language in Google TTS, we pre-stored the messages and letters as voices by voice actors!
The subscription
– The first step, please write a simple comment on Google Text to Speech app on the Google play store and point out that the Arabic language has not been supported yet, especially since they’re supporting a lot of other languages. The blind now using this shared and common comment (you can copy then paste it as a comment) from here.
– The second step is tweeting/posting with the hashtag of the campaign and point this is a right to provide good accessibility services in such a great operating system for all blind around the world, including the Arab blind. Here is a page that includes ready copied/pasted tweets to share with your friends on your social media accounts. Please help us as developers or blind to support Arabic voices in Google TTS.
The hashtag that used in the social media is:
#SupportArabicInGoogleTTS
Contact
Do you have any questions about the campaign? Please contact us here.
Hi,
I do not why Google txt to speech does not support Arabic Lang until now ?????
Br
I was shocked when I realized that tts doesn't support Arabic!
Indeed!
We need the Arabic TTS
Arabic language in google tts is now available