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Desiderato Merriwether
1. Write the first four lines of Emily Dickinson's poem "I asked no other thing" in IPA using the system discussed in the lecture on English pronunciation. These days, most standard word processing programs should be able to deal with IPA characters in the standard UTF-8 Unicode encoding, which is what you'll get by cutting and pasting from this interactive application for creating IPA strings (or this one).
We got any dog lovers in here tonight?
You notice the way I said that word?
I said "dawg". That's D A W G -- "dawg".
That's man's best friend I'm talking about, lovable, loyal and lop-eared.
(He'll) bring you brandy when you're lost in a snow drift,
lay his grizzled snoot up on your knee
and look up at you with those big limpid brown eyes and say "I love you, I'm a dawg."
And then there're dogs: D O G S -- yip yaps.
(They) weigh about a pound and a half apiece:
be-jeweled, be-ribboned, be-furred, pomaded, powdered,
painted toenails, rhinestone collars,
designed by God and nature to be trolled in the wake of a slow moving boat
in search of large trash fish ... such as hammerhead sharks.
In the lecture on sociolinguistics, we'll take up the connections among class, gender, formality and dialect that this passage expresses. Your task today is simpler: just figure out how to spell Gamble's pronunciation of the phrase I said "dawg" from the passage quoted above, in the IPA symbols.
You can assume that the consonants are basically spelled in IPA as they are in standard English orthography (in these three words -- don't assume this in part 1 of this homework!). Thus the result will be something of the form:
It will help you to save the audio samples on your computer, and to use a computer program that allows you to select a short segment and listen to it over and over again carefully, or perhaps to analyze it in other ways. To save a linked file to your computer, use right-click>>Save link as... (Windows) or control-click>>Save link as... (Mac OS X).
A number of IPA tutorials are available on the web, and you may find some of them useful. (...but if you search for IPA Tutorial rather than international phonetic alphabet tutorial, Google's suggestions of "Ingenuity Pathway Analysis", "iPhone Applications", and other interpretations of the three letters IPA, will probably NOT be helpful...).
Note on joint work: you're welcome to work together on this assignment, but if you do, increase the amount of work by the number of people doing the work. Thus if two of you cooperate, then in (1) you should transcribe 2x4=8 lines of poetry; in (2) you should transcribe two additional lines; in (2) you should do this comparison as well; and in (3) also transcribe the phrase "and then there's dogs" as well.
You may have noticed that starting with this issue, the AccessWorld web pages have been redesigned. We hope you will find them both more appealing and easier to use. Article pages now resemble the AccessWorld home page, and all pages are more colorful and attractive. The navigation links are easier to find at the top of the right-hand column, and the AccessWorld Search is now right on the page, near the top. But if these links get in your way, you can also move them back to the bottom of the page by visiting the "Change Colors and More" page. Screen reader users can select the "Jump to Article" link to go directly to the article on a particular page. And, we have changed AccessWorld's subtitle to "Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired." We find that more descriptive, and it will help Internet search engines bring more potential readers to our site. Please e-mail us and let us know what you think of the new design.
To cut down on spam, some web sites and services require new users to type a word that is displayed in a graphic on the screen. The letters are slightly distorted by a background image. This is called visual verification, and it is not accessible for users of screen readers or many people with low vision. Some sites provide an audio pronunciation of the word as an alternative. However, the audio can be hard to understand, too.
Two major players on the web, Google and Yahoo!, use visual verification. They have so far been unwilling to create an accessible alternative. E-mail verification is one current alternative. More work needs to be done to ensure that people who are blind or have low vision are not shut out of online services.
In this issue, Lee Huffman, of AFB's Technology and Employment Center in Huntington, West Virginia (AFB TECH) , reviews ZoomText, version 9.0, from Ai Squared, and LunarPlus, version 6.5, from Dolphin Computer Access, two of the three most popular screen magnification products on the market. MAGic, from Freedom Scientific, will be evaluated in a future issue. Each product was evaluated on its documentation and electronic help, ease of installation, control panel, magnification and display features, and speech output. Its performance was tested in Microsoft Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Find out how these programs compared.
Deborah Kendrick interviews Glen Gordon, chief technical officer of Freedom Scientific. Gordon discusses his ongoing work on JAWS for Windows, his career before he joined Henter-Joyce and then Freedom Scientific, and more. Read about a key developer of one of the most popular products in the assistive technology field.
Janet Ingber, author and music therapist, writes about video description of television and movies. The article covers the history of video description, as well as previous attempts to legislate a requirement that networks include description in some programming. Ingber then profiles the players in the description field and explains how they create description and add it to programs.
Darren Burton and Lee Huffman, of AFB TECH, evaluate large stand-alone copy machines. The first in a series of articles to cover different types of copy machines, this one explores the accessibility of units that have been commonly used in offices over the past couple of decades. Future articles will examine the smaller, less expensive desktop units that are now available and review accessibility solutions from Canon and Xerox that have been designed to make their units more accessible and usable for people who are blind or have low vision. Find out how accessible these machines are.
Chris Hofstader, freelance writer and itinerant research scientist, contrasts the audio output of adapted computer games with that of screen readers. He points out that audio games provide access to information through multiple sound cues. In contrast, screen readers generally do not include sounds as additional information. Instead, they provide a single stream of speech output. Video game developers have led the way to many of the most interesting discoveries in mainstream computing. Perhaps audio games can perform a similar service.
I report on the seventh annual conference of the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA), held on January 18-21, 2006, in Orlando, Florida. The ATIA conference featured many new products and product updates, as well as a number of sessions of interest to people who are blind or have low vision. Learn what we found in the exhibit hall and conference sessions.
It seems odd to me that the pronunciation of the title of an article, such as a person's name, often seems prominent out of proportion to its significance to the article. As an example, here's the opening sentence of article on the actor Ciaran Hinds: "Ciarn Hinds (pronunciation: /kɪˈɛra:n haɪndz/ or Kee-uh-rawn, with the 'uh' barely spoken; the name is Anglicised as Kieran, pronounced Keer-an where the long 'a' of the Irish is shortened) was born in Belfast." Surely the most important thing is that "Ciaran Hinds is a Belfast-born actor" or some similarly succinct statement of who he is. Why cram the pronunciation of his name, including alternative spellings, etc., into the very first sentence? I'm not suggesting that the pronunciation of names be dropped or suppressed, but it seems odd that the de facto style (i.e., to insert the pronunciation of the name immediately after its first occurrence) is clumsy and awkward. Is this really a part of the standard Wikipedia style? --24.189.116.153 03:19, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but perhaps this MoS should provide guidance on when to provide pronunciation help. Certainly obvious names like Bill Clinton don't need it, but where's the line drawn? I notice we tend to include it on non-English names almost exclusively. --W.marsh 21:30, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
Consider this a reminder that a world exists beyond wikipedia and the average person who comes to this site does it to find out information based on commonly used tools. And the IPA is a major hindrance.
I'm sure this is probably not a new argument and has probably been debated endlessly before. But I wasn't here then and neither were many who will now use wikipedia. I am a fairly well educated person, I hold a BFA from New York University which I attended on scholarship. So trust me when I say the IPA is not well known as some might assume. When I began to encounter it for the first time on wikipedia, I assumed that it was some sort of Britishism.
Sorry, but what most people who speak English are familiar with is the system used in American and English dictionaries. To use something different even if it is more accurate/flexible/international is akin to deciding that there should be only one international wikipedia written in Esperanto. Why not? It would also encourage people to learn this more useful language rather than English. To belabor the obvious, it wasn't done because people simply want to know what other films Chiwetel Ejiofor has appeared in or what a cudgel is.
It is the same with IPA, which seems to have slapped onto articles in defiance of common sense. At the very least, the use of both the standard pronunciation symbols and the IPA should be encouraged. Considering the concern that editorializing not be allowed in articles, the use of IPA seems like a double standard.RoyBatty42 20:15, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
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