Do you use a screen reader and read arabic content with it? Have you ever wondered why Arabic tts literally always sucks, being either super unresponsive, or gets most things wrong all the time? I've been wanting to rant about this for ages!
Imagine if English dropped most vowels: "Th ct st n th mt" for "The cat sat on the mat" and expected you to just KNOW which vowels go where. That's basically what Arabic does all day every day! Arabic uses an abjad, not an alphabet. Basically, we mostly write consonants, and the vowels are just... assumed? Like, they are very important in speech but we don't really write them down except in very rare and special cases (children's books, religious texts, etc). No one writes them at all otherwise and that is very acceptable because the language is designed that way.
A proper Arabic tts needs to analyze the entire sentence, maybe even the whole paragraph because the exact same word could have different unwritten vowels depending on its location, which actually changes its form and meaning! But for screen readers, you want your tts to be fast and responsive. And you do that by skipping all of that semantic processing. Instead it's literally just half-assed guess work which is almost wrong all the time, so we end up hearing everything the wrong way and just cope with it.
It gets worse. What if we give the tts a single word to read (which is pretty common when you're more closely analyzing something). Let's apply that logic to English. Imagine you are the tts engine. You get presented with just 'st', with no surrounding context and have to figure out the vowels here. Is it Sit? Soot? Set? Maybe even stay? You literally don't know, but each of those might be valid even with how wildly the meaning could be different.
It's EXACTLY like that in Arabic, but much worse because it happens all the time. You highlight a word like 'كتب' (ktb) on its own. What does the TTS say? Does it guess 'kataba' (he wrote)? 'Kutiba' (it was written)? 'Kutub' (books (a freaking NOUN!))? Or maybe even 'kutubi' (my books)? The TTS literally just takes a stab in the dark, and usually defaults to the most basic verb form, 'kataba', even if the context screams 'books'!
So yeah. We're stuck with tools that make us work twice as hard just to understand our own language. You will get used to it over time, but It adds this whole extra layer of cognitive load that speakers of, say, English just don't have to deal with when using their screen readers.
![Screenshot of a "Command Prompt" window with the command:
"C:\echo I love NVDA!" above the text "I love NVDA!" and a new prompt "C:\" with the caret below that.](https://media.social.cologne/cache/preview_cards/images/018/096/447/original/3a307fc7d215fc47.jpg "Screenshot of a \"Command Prompt\" window with the command:
\"C:\echo I love NVDA!\" above the text \"I love NVDA!\" and a new prompt \"C:\\" with the caret below that.")
Samuel Proulx
)
