I arrived at Web 4 All in Beijing this morning and one of the first people I bumped into was Charles Chen over at Google. Charles is the guy behind FireVox, the screen reader extension for FireFox, and has been busy working on a solution to incorporate translation into Google instant messaging in a way that makes it screen reader accessible. This means that a screen reader will be able to read it it the correct language and seemlessly jump between the two. Pretty impressive.
The tool is essentially your regular Google instant messaging box but with translation support added so you can have text translated on the fly. It works using ARIA and the AxsJAX library together with Google Translate.
To start using this all you need to do is add a translation feauture as a friend and chat as normal. When you send text it will appear in the original as well as the translate language. The ARIA support then allows the translated text to be read out loud by screen readers.
There are roughly 25 languages supported distinguished by their own two letter identifier in an email address. If you want to try it in Chinese, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. If you want to chat with someone you then just add them to the conversation and away you go.
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