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Phonics and NVDA

Jane Sharp
 

Hi

I wondered if anyone has found a way to allow very young learners to use NVDA while they are developing literacy through the use of phonics.

I have a learner who is learning letter sounds and starting to build words. So for example, for pet, puh eh tuh. We’d like her to be able to type this and get those sounds from character echo rather than the letter names, p e t, and then when she presses space to get the word pet pronounced correctly. 

I can change the pronunciation of the letters in the Dictionary but this messes up word echo. Does anyone have any better suggestions?

Thanks

Jane
Luke Davis
 

Jane Sharp wrote:

I have a learner who is learning letter sounds and starting to build words. So for example, for pet, puh eh tuh. We’d like her to be able to type this and
get those sounds from character echo rather than the letter names, p e t, and then when she presses space to get the word pet pronounced correctly. 
You would probably need to commission an add-on for this. I don't know of anything that can do it out of the box.

One of the problems you're going to run into, is that sounds like "puh" and "tuh", wherein you pronounce the "uh" part of the sound, are incorrect phonics. The P is supposed to be taught as just the plosive, without any vowel sound. Same for B--it's supposed to be just the lip action, with as minimal vowel involvement as possible. T should be just the tongue and teeth action, etc.
(The cost of being raised by an expert phonics teacher.)
Getting any synth to do that right is going to be difficult, and probably require phoneme work deeper than just letter manipulation.

Doing it with sound files of a human tied to each key would probably be more likely to produce phonics-accurate results, and, at least with my level of technical knowledge, would be practically more easy to implement, although someone with more experience at manipulating phonemic information at that level might find the synth just as workable.

I can change the pronunciation of the letters in the Dictionary but this messes up word echo.
Can you give an example of how that breaks?

Luke

"Beware of wishing for justice... You might get it." - Lois McMaster Bujold
Jane Sharp
 

You’re right, of course, that changing the dictionary can’t produce true phonics, only a very rough approximation. I was hoping this would be just good enough but substituting huh for h, for example, then affects the pronunciation of any words with h in as the speech reads all three letters in the substitution - I think that’s what it’s doing anyway.

Jane

On 15 May 2021, at 00:46, Luke Davis <luke@...> wrote:

Jane Sharp wrote:

I have a learner who is learning letter sounds and starting to build words. So for example, for pet, puh eh tuh. We’d like her to be able to type this and
get those sounds from character echo rather than the letter names, p e t, and then when she presses space to get the word pet pronounced correctly.
You would probably need to commission an add-on for this. I don't know of anything that can do it out of the box.

One of the problems you're going to run into, is that sounds like "puh" and "tuh", wherein you pronounce the "uh" part of the sound, are incorrect phonics. The P is supposed to be taught as just the plosive, without any vowel sound. Same for B--it's supposed to be just the lip action, with as minimal vowel involvement as possible. T should be just the tongue and teeth action, etc.
(The cost of being raised by an expert phonics teacher.)
Getting any synth to do that right is going to be difficult, and probably require phoneme work deeper than just letter manipulation.

Doing it with sound files of a human tied to each key would probably be more likely to produce phonics-accurate results, and, at least with my level of technical knowledge, would be practically more easy to implement, although someone with more experience at manipulating phonemic information at that level might find the synth just as workable.

I can change the pronunciation of the letters in the Dictionary but this messes up word echo.
Can you give an example of how that breaks?

Luke

"Beware of wishing for justice... You might get it." - Lois McMaster Bujold
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