Help sought with different browsers

[John Williams (News)]

20+ years ago I tried to get HTML to perform what I thought was a simple
task - click on a picture and get a sound sample played.

Then it was pictures of animals; cat, dog, cow, bird, hens, horse, sheep,
duck, pig. This was when I was working in Special Education with infants.

HTML wasn't up to the job then, so I wrote a program to do it instead, and
I remember that I couldn't find a suitable pig noise, so I had to record
that myself! And I mean myself personally, as the sound performance artist!

Recently my French class asked about pronouncing French letters - you know,
if you were spelling something out to a French person - say over the 'phone!

So I embarked once again on my quest, only to find that not a lot has
changed over the intervening score of years!

What I produced works with some browsers and not with others, so, to try
and find out what works where, I've added a brief questionnaire to my page
at:

http://petit.four.free.fr/French_Resources/SpellOut/index.php

in the hope that the feedback I receive may help me assess how viable the
idea is.

So, I am appealing to you to visit the page and give me feedback through
the form as to whether or not it works for you on your battery of different
browsers on different machines!

It doesn't work with NetSurf under RISC OS,but does under Raspian with
Chrome on the RPi.

Your feedback would be much appreciated!

Best wishes,

John

--
John Williams, now back in the UK - no attachments to these addresses!
Non-RISC OS posters change user to johnrwilliams or put 'risc' in subject!
Who is John Williams? http://petit.four.free.fr/picindex/author/

[John Williams (News)]

In article <56615350...@tiscali.co.uk>,

John Williams (News) <UCE...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:

> So, I am appealing to you

Obviously I'm not as appealing as I thought I was!

C'mon you lot - it'll only take a minute!

[Russell Hafter News]

In article <56615350...@tiscali.co.uk>, John Williams
(News) <UCE...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:

> http://petit.four.free.fr/French_Resources/SpellOut/index.php

> in the hope that the feedback I receive may help me
> assess how viable the idea is.

> So, I am appealing to you to visit the page and give me
> feedback through the form as to whether or not it works
> for you on your battery of different browsers on
> different machines!

> It doesn't work with NetSurf under RISC OS,but does under
> Raspian with Chrome on the RPi.

I did not try it under Risc OS 4.

You should have received four reports - only Opera worked
here. Firefox + Pale Moon neither worked nor produced an
error.

IE 8 and Safari (both ancient with Win XP) did not work, but
did produce the error message.

Given that it is a French teaching aid, I would have done it
with a proper AZERTY keyboard layout too...

It /is/ a useful tool though; as one who every so often has
to spell his name in French I know that I often get 'e' and
'h' wrong.

--
Russell
Russell Hafter
E-mail to russell at russellhafter dot me dot uk
Need a hotel? <http://www.hrs.com/?client=en__blue&customerId=416873103>
Friendly web hosting <https://www.xencentrichosting.uk/billing/aff.php?aff=7>

[John Williams (News)]

In article <56615ce7...@russellhafter.me.invalid>,

Russell Hafter News <see...@russellhafter.me.invalid> wrote:

> Given that it is a French teaching aid, I would have done it
> with a proper AZERTY keyboard layout too...

But it's for English people faced with a task - my ultimate aim is to have
it read out a text string - to copy vocally, or even to loudspeak down a
telephone receiver!

But it needs to work first! Hence my questionnaire!

[John Williams (News)]

In article <56615ce7...@russellhafter.me.invalid>,
Russell Hafter News <see...@russellhafter.me.invalid> wrote:

> I would have done it with a proper AZERTY keyboard layout too...

Un pas trop loin!

[John Williams (News)]

In article <56615ce7...@russellhafter.me.invalid>,
Russell Hafter News <see...@russellhafter.me.invalid> wrote:

> It /is/ a useful tool though; as one who every so often has
> to spell his name in French I know that I often get 'e' and
> 'h' wrong.

Uh Ash

If you can find a German alphabet recorded, there's no reason why it
couldn't eventually be polylingual!

I already know the first 5 letters of the Welsh alphabet!

[Russell Hafter News]

In article <56615ea7...@tiscali.co.uk>, John Williams

(News) <UCE...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <56615ce7...@russellhafter.me.invalid>,
> Russell Hafter News <see...@russellhafter.me.invalid>
> wrote:

> > It /is/ a useful tool though; as one who every so often
> > has to spell his name in French I know that I often get
> > 'e' and 'h' wrong.

> Uh Ash

Yes, your page reminded me!

> If you can find a German alphabet recorded, there's no
> reason why it couldn't eventually be polylingual!

Yes, I figured that out too - though I do not have a problem
with German. That said, Germans normally spell things out
using firstnames for letters, so John = Johann / Oskar /
Heinrich / Norbert

> I already know the first 5 letters of the Welsh alphabet!

A B C D E?

:-)

[John Williams (News)]

Thanks to all who responded.

I'm afraid the results I got from your help made no particular sense to me
at all - there seemed to be no discernible pattern whatsoever.

I understand that there are JavaScript solutions, but my understanding of
that is less than minimal, despite being able to throw stuff together in
PHP, which doesn't /look/ that different.

It's PHP on the page which defines which sample name to play when a
particular button is clicked on, and the HTML 5 audio tag is supposed to be
able to choose an appropriate one from the three types I've made available
(Ogg, MP3, Wave), and should otherwise print the "Your browser doesn't
support ..." message in red, but not even the appearance of that message is
consistent across the failing browsers participating in the test.

Thus that itself could not be used to trigger an alternative client-side
script as a fall-back even if I /were/ able to provide one!

So thanks again to all who helped, and I will be back for more testing if I
find an alternative way.

Such a shame that the implementation of HTML itself cannot rise even now to
such a straightforward challenge. I suspect this is largely due to those
who insist on unwanted background sound/music on their web pages leading to
this patchy and inconsistent implementation.

[Vince M Hudd]

On 25/07/17 21:23, John Williams (News) wrote:
> In article <56615350...@tiscali.co.uk>,
> John Williams (News) <UCE...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:

>> So, I am appealing to you

> Obviously I'm not as appealing as I thought I was!

> C'mon you lot - it'll only take a minute!

Good grief, John - your original request was sent out on the 25th at
8:39pm, and this follow-up at 9:23pm the same evening. Give people a
chance - some of us have lives, or in my case pretend to have one! :p

I've just sent you two more results - Firefox and Chrome, both running
on Linux Mint.

--
Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software - www.softrock.co.uk
RISCOSitory - www.riscository.com

[Vince M Hudd]

On 25/07/17 22:43, John Williams (News) wrote:

> I already know the first 5 letters of the Welsh alphabet!

Nonsense. The Welsh alphabet only has two letters, and they're both l.