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VoiceOver Voice 'Century Assumptions' - Any Solutions?

By PaulMartz, 29 June, 2023

Member of the AppleVis Blog Team

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

In English, years are often shortened to an apostrophe followed by the last two digits. For example, '30. Some word processors convert the apostrophe to a right single quote. That's okay and is exactly what I want for my work.

The problem is that many VoiceOver voices incorrectly verbalize the right single quote with an assumption for the century. For example, rather than verbalize right single quote 30 as "30", some voices verbalize this as "1930". That's a real problem if the text is actually referring to 2030, or 2130.

The problem occurs with the Alison voice, but not Alex. Setting a pronunciation rule in the VoiceOver Utility is impossible, as there is no way to specify a right single quote character.

By tinkering around a bit more, I've discovered that a right single quote followed by any two digits between 30 and 99 will result in VoiceOver assuming the year is in the 20th century, and any two digits between 00 and 29 is assumed to be in the 21st century.

So here's my question: Is there any way for a VoiceOver user to control the century assumption? Controls I would like to have include: The ability to verbalize or not verbalize the right single quote, ability to specify which century to assume, and ability to set the threshold year between two century assumptions.

Thanks for any help.

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