Apple ramps up support for disabilities

Mac OS X Lion will introduce some 53 new synthesized speech voices, people said to be familiar with the OS claim. While none of the voices can yet be downloaded in full form for the developer preview, AppleInsider remarks that demos are already accessible. To get the complete voices people will have to download packs ranging from a third to a half of a gigabyte.

New American English voices include Tom, Samantha and Jill, joining Alex and Vicki from previous iterations of Mac OS X. Added regional English variants include Karen and Lee for Australia, and Daniel, Emily and Serena for British English. Irish, Indian, Scottish and South African dialects are represented by Moira, Sangeetal, Fiona and Tessa, respectively.

The bulk of the new audio addresses non-English languages. Chinese, for instance, has three voices, divided between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland. French has three for France, and two for francophone Canadians. Other dialects include Czech, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai and Turkish. More nuanced options are Saudi Arabic, Belgian or Netherlands Dutch, original or Brazilian Portugese, and original or Mexican Spanish.

by MacNN Staff