I was trying to add a Romanian word to my NVDA default dictionary. The word has a cedilla-type accent under the lower-case t. The word is putin (with the accent under the t, ț) ... the word means "a little", as in I speak a little Romanian.

I actually wanted to add two words to my default dictionary, first a Romanian city that also has the t with cedilla, Constanța and I entered that with the replacement pronunciation ConStantza. I set it to be replaced as whole-word-only and that works perfectly. I then wanted to add the t with cedilla accent as a character in its own right with a replacement of "t with cedilla", again as whole-word-only so that if I investigated a word with the accented t letter by letter, it would get spoken as "t with cedilla" but the word putin wouldn't be spoken as "putwith cedillain" ... and that works ... except not when navigating character by character through the word!

When reading the word letter by letter, it doesn't matter how I change the replacement text for the t with cedilla character, it gets spelled-out letter by letter: t w i t h c e d i l l a. To clarify, if I am reading this whole post, for example, when NVDA gets to the t with cedilla character it says "t with cedilla"; when I reach the character navigating letter by letter, such as in the placename NVDA reads C o n s t a n t w i t h c e d i l l a!

I deleted the character from the default dictionary and added it to the voice dictionary for SAPI-5 Zira. The result was the same. I then tried changing to another SAPI-5 voice, Hazel ... and again the word gets fully spelled-out including the replacement text, even though NVDA can speak the replacement text just fine when I tab from and then back to the replacement text in the dictionary entry (NVDA can say cedilla as a full word without difficulty)

I just wondered if anybody has any suggestions on why this might be happening ... I have actually just found a solution ... if I use the 1 Core version of Zira rather than the SAPI-5 version, the t with cedilla always gets spoken as complete words when the word is navigated character by character - it is not spelled out. That shouldln't be a big change to make - the default dictionary entries will be the same and all I'll need to copy across is the text from the SAPI-5 Zira dictionary file and paste it into the 1 Core Zira voice dictionary file!

I could probably delete this post rather than posting it, but I am going to post it because others might find it interesting ... and I'd certainly be interested in any suggestions or observations :)

Giles