Oh sure! You don't read it the same way at all. I'm just saying, you
should have characters, they should have names, so you get NVDA to read
out the names, probably if you go character by character because they'd
be a mess as words I'd think, and then you go through the same hell as
the sighted, associating each character with its sound. Other than
having a map of characters to names and having them read, there's really
nothing extra a blind person has to do over a sighted person. Besides
... how else are you going to learn about open and closed vowels in
Masai, I ask you?
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On 11/27/2018 14:58, Brian Vogel wrote:
John, you wrote, in part: "There's nothing about sight that makes you
look at an 's'
with a mark under it and immediately go "ah yes, that's the 'sh' sound,
as in English 'ship"! You learn that when you learn the IPA."
Indeed, that is true.
You also wrote, "Now, maybe it's harder because nobody bothered to
name the IPA characters."
Bingo, and the character names are just a mess. I
think that most speakers of English get that "shingle", spelled s h i
n g l e, where each character has a single syllable name, much more
easily than Esh, small capital I, n, lowercase script g, l
I certainly never looked at the word shingle,
phonetically transcribed, and ever thought about the characters in the
way I do when reading text. Perhaps I'm odd. But I would no sooner
condemn someone to work with phonetic transcription who's blind, and
expect ease and proficiency, than I'd expect them to fly to the moon
using their arms as propulsion. And I'll be the first to admit that
there are plenty of sighted who never get the hang of the IPA,
either. And heaven forbid you're going to deal with phonetics across
languages, some of which take forever [if ever] to retrain the ear to
even hear (or the brain to process) when those are not linguistically
significant sounds in your first language, then having to put those
down on paper in the IPA! Thanks, but no thanks.
But, to each his or her own. Some people like
challenges that I'd sooner avoid.
--
Brian *-*Windows 10 Home, 64-Bit, Version 1809, Build 17763
*/A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the
need for illusion is deep./*
~ Saul Bellow, /To Jerusalem and Back/
