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Questions about using Chinese language with VoiceOver

By Vsevolod Popov, 20 July, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all! Tomorrow will be a month since I started learning Chinese and I have some questions about VoiceOver use with this language. 1. I know that to enter Chinese characters with pinyin, I need to enter them in English first and the hints for Chinese characters will be displayed at the top above the keyboard. But I also noticed that there is an option "Autotext" in rotor when chinese pinyin keyboard is activated. How does this option work? 2. I noticed that for some languages the gestures direction is changed from left to right to right to left and Chinese is one of them. Is it possible to change it backwards? Why are gestures changed when system language is set to Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese? Thank you in advance!

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Interesting questions. I've…

By Wenwei

1 year 4 months ago

Interesting questions. I've never encountered either of these problems. I suspect that the autotext option would be useful if you just want the keyboard to fill in characters for you. I don't use it. I type in the pinyin representation of the characters I want and select them. As for your second question, I wonder if your gestures are reversed because traditionally languages like Chinese and Arabic are read from right to left? I never changed my system language to Chinese so I've never experienced this.

zhuyin

By techluver

1 year 4 months ago

I've never used auto text but I use zhuyin because my mother is from Taiwan and pinyin baffles me. lol
As for the second question I think it just comes down to reading order.

Autotext and gestures reverse

By Vsevolod Popov

1 year 4 months ago

Hi! Thank you for your answers! As far as auto text, is it possible to get read of this option in rotor if it's not really used anyway? As for the gestures reversing, I am not sure if they are reversed, I forgot where can I check that?

Suggestion

By Edward Louie

1 year 4 months ago

The auto text rotor with a Chinese keyboards are used for suggesting certain words when you use the keyboard, basically in Chinese there are a lot of different words that have the same pronunciation, and VoiceOver will describe what the word is, for example, America VoiceOver will say Beautifuls beautiful, China’s country, and that’s with simplified Chinese.
Also, when I change the system language, voiceover gestures don’t actually flip over, I have personally used voice over in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese Taiwan and Hong Kong.
As with the gesture changes, it only applies to Arabic and Hebrew, not Chinese, what version of Chinese are you using, there is traditional Hong Kong, simplified Chinese China, and traditional Taiwan.
I’ve actually never encountered directionality changes when using Chinese.
Supported voiceover languages/dialects in Chinese is Mandarin and Cantonese only.
I have personally used voice over in both Mandarin and Cantonese

fir your first question

By ming

1 year 4 months ago

for the auto text thing.
it will depence your typing habbit or! to guest the next word for you.
I use traditional pinyin, as well.

What voice?

By techluver

1 year 4 months ago

What voice do you all use to read Chinese on the iPhone? I have yet to find one I'm happy with.

for cantonese users

By ming

1 year 4 months ago

I am from Hong Kong.
so, my dialet is cantonese!
the siri voices for cantonese is very good.
and the most majority people who speak cantonese they are using Sin Ji,

one of the very popular cantonese voice for screen reader.

for mandarin users

By ming

1 year 4 months ago

for the mandarinusers.

they have taiwanese and the mainland China voices to choose.
but, I haven't look in to it yet.

Gestures direction

By Vsevolod Popov

1 year 4 months ago

Hi all! I have just checked, and yes, there is no gesture change when using the phone in Chinese. I definitely confused it with other languages. Sorry for confusing!

I'll answer your confusion

By Carter Wu

1 year 4 months ago

Hello ,
I'm glad you're willing to learn Chinese. One thing to be clear about Chinese, where did you study Chinese? In other words, do you study Mandarin Chinese in mainland China, Cantonese in Hong Kong or Mandarin in Taiwan? The three Chinese languages ​​are not only different in pronunciation and grammar, but more importantly, for the visually impaired who operate the iPhone, the user habits represented by the three languages ​​are also very different.Take me as an example, I'm from mainland China. Starting from the usage habits of many years, when we finish typing a word, we will use the "autotext" rotor that is automatically triggered to use one finger to swipe up and down on the screen to select the desired candidate word. But if it is a friend from Hong Kong or Taiwan, they may give you another answer. A lot of people think Auto Text is more efficient than touching the candidate word above the keyboard, and I'm guessing maybe that's because VoiceOver is slightly more responsive with Autotext. The real trouble with AutoText is that it always pops up out of place to interfere with us when we want to edit the text we just typed, so we have to manually turn the rotor to "Character" to continue. I don't know if you can understand what I'm trying to say. If you encounter any difficulties, you can leave me a message.

swiping up and down

By ming

1 year 4 months ago

yeah
I use swiping up and down for choosing the word.
and I use traditional pinyin,
but, I use dictate sometime though
I heard that in IOS 16 it will have cantonese pinyin!

I use dictation mostly

By techluver

1 year 4 months ago

I mostly use dictation, but when I need to type I type in the bopomofo characters then select the word from the top as to which one I need.

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