Yesterday, I announced on Facebook that the Bartimaeus Alliance of the Blind has released a digital braille format version of Jacob Weingreen’s A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew. This, along with other digital braille files available on their site, may be an important breakthrough for people who are blind and who want to study Hebrew. It will, at least, provide a means of getting them started.
I have spent a good amount of time this week evaluating the state of support for biblical languages with two popular screen readers. Whatever anyone seems to be hearing from any company, the answer from this corner is that it is very bad. JAWS supports modern Greek but not Hebrew (unless you also buy Hebrew JAWS). NVDA supports modern Greek and modern Hebrew. I have not tried Hebrew JAWS, but I suspect it also supports only modern Hebrew.
Both modern Greek and modern Hebrew lack a significant number of characters needed for the study of ancient biblical languages. If a person uses a screen reader that does not include the full character set, that person will not be successful as a biblical language scholar.
In 2011, Lauren Tuchman and I gave a presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature regarding the use of technology as a tool to enable biblical language scholars who are blind. We discussed the value that scholars who are blind have contributed to the field of biblical studies over time. We also discussed the ways that technology can empower scholars to access biblical language material. At the end of the presentation, I summarized some areas of the unmet access need: languages that did not yet have braille coding systems, software programs that were not yet tested for accessibility, etc. Clicking this link will bring up the audio of my summary.
When evaluating a program and screen reader for accessibility of biblical language material, one test needs to be the user’s ability to navigate the program easily. The other needs to be the ability to read the characters. If some of the characters are missing, the biblical scholar cannot study the text accurately. This would seem to be self-evident; but it is amazing how many people to not pick up on the problem.
What was stable at the time when Lauren and I gave the presentation was the state of screen reader support for Hebrew and Greek with JAWS. Sadly, JAWS was the only screen reader supporting the ancient languages; and this was only done because I created a special braille table that users could insert into their configurations. I must now report that the only biblical language that can be easily studied using computerized resources is Greek–and this only as long as the JAWS table continues to function.
I will begin working with NVDA, and perhaps I will be able to develop a table for support for it. But this kind of work represents many, many hours of lost progress. I am truly heartbroken. For a Hebrew scholar, access to the biblical text itself is only a part of the work in ancient languages. I also read Hebrew in commentaries, in lexicons when I look up unfamiliar vocabularies, in advanced Hebrew study material as I seek to further my understanding of the language… I did not just decide to take a couple of years of Hebrew and be finished. There is much Hebrew available in electronic format. But without the means to read–and specifically, without the means to read ancient Hebrew, I will not continue my Hebrew study over the long term. As technology progresses, it must remain accessible. In particular, in the effort to meet locale-related needs, it must also be remembered that we live in multilingual societies–people in Israel don’t just speak Hebrew, and people in America don’t just speak and read English.
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