וhtml> Writing in Hebrew and Greek Using Your Keyboard

WRITING IN HEBREW AND GREEK USING YOUR KEYBOARD

This information is provided by Sarah J. Blake in order to assist students who are blind or visually impaired in configuring their computers for the study of Hebrew and Greek. Information is modified from the manuals of the Logos Biblical Greek and Hebrew keyboards and the JAWS for Windows help system. Some information is also modified from Robert Englebretson's page on using Unicode with IPA.

Overview of the Keyboards

These keyboards are provided by Logos Systems to make writing Hebrew and Greek intuitive for English speakers. Hebrew and Greek letters are mapped as nearly as possible to their phonetic English equivalents. Occasionally this is not possible due to lack of a phonetic equivalent (e.g. the Hebrew khet) or multiple letters with a somewhat similar sound (e.g. Greek omicron and omega). In these cases, a key whose English sound has no equivalent in the other language is used.

The links on this page allow you to download the keyboards and learn the key assignments. Additional information is provided about installing the keyboard and configuring your computer to provide you with spoken feedback regarding the characters while typing or reading by letter.

Download the Keyboards

Download the appropriate keyboard for the language you wish to use by pressing enter on the link and choosing save. Do not run them from this site. These are executable files. Installation instructions are included below.

Installation

To install the keyboards:

  1. Open control panel and go to regional and language options.
  2. If you are using Hebrew, on the languages tab, check the box that says install files for complex script and right to left languages. Press enter on ok. If necessary, restart your system.
  3. Run the program and allow it to extract itself to a folder.
  4. Go to the folder and locate setup.exe inside the subfolders. Run this and complete the installation program.
  5. Go to control panel\regional and language options. On the languages tab, press space on the details button.
  6. Tab once to a tree view showing the installed keyboards for each language you have set up on your computer. Press down arrow until you hear "Hebrew." If it says closed, press right arrow to open it. Move down to see if Logos is the installed keyboard. If there are any other keyboards associated with the Hebrew language, highlight them and tab to the remove button.
  7. Press enter on ok.

Keyboard Layout

For the layout of the keyboards, and to test whether your computer is displaying the characters correctly, go to the link for each language.

Hebrew
Greek

Making JAWS Speak the Letters You Type

JAWS cannot read the Hebrew or Greek languages; but it can be configured to speak the individual letters correctly so that you can edit your writing. Since I have already created the Unicode tables, you do not need to do this yourself. You need only to paste them into the file that controls the pronunciation of letters. Note that if you study both Hebrew and Greek, you will need both tables. Here is how.

  1. First, be sure your system is optimized so that you can see your system folders and files.
    1. In control panel, press enter on folder options.
    2. On the view tab, go to the tree view and press down arrow to move to the items that need changing, and use the spacebar to change the state of each item.
    3. Press ok until you are out, and exit control panel.
  2. Browse to the folder where your user-specific Jaws settings files are stored. On most systems, the path will look something like: "C:\Documents and Settings\[UserName]\Application Data\Freedom Scientific\JAWS\[version]\Settings\enu" where [UserName] is the personal account which you use on the machine, and [version] represents the version number of Jaws you are using (e.g. 9.0).
  3. Using NotePad or another plain-text editor, open the .sbl file for the speech synthesizer you use. For example, if you use Eloquence, open eloq.sbl. (If this file does not exist in your settings directory, you'll need to copy it from the Jaws default settings folder.)
  4. Move your cursor to the bottom of the language-specific section for the language you are using. For example, if you use American English with Eloquence, you would position your cursor at the end of the line immediately above the label [British English]. Press enter to create a blank line. (British English follows American English in the file.) Note that the last line in this section begins with the word "symbol" and a number. The Hebrew or Greek symbols you insert should continue this numbering.
  5. Now, right-click on the following link: Hebrew_SBL.txt or Greek_SBL.txt and choose "save target as" from the context menu. Do not press enter on this link, as it will not display correctly in Internet Explorer. Save this file on your desktop, or in any other convenient folder. This file contains the Unicode values of all of the Hebrew and Greek characters, along with their names, in the appropriate format for a Jaws synthesizer file. Of course if you don't like the names in this file, you can edit them to any value you want.
  6. Open this file, edit the symbol numbers if necessary so that the first one corresponds to the number that should be next in your .sbl file, and copy the entire contents to the clipboard.
  7. Paste the entire contents of Hebrew_SBL.txt or Greek_SBL.txt (which you just copied to the clipboard) into the .sbl file you have opened, at the cursor position specified above.
  8. Save the .sbl file, then exit and restart Jaws.

Note: This configuration prevents the letters from being read during say all mode, allowing you to read an English file with Hebrew or Greek context. This will allow for study using both speech and braille simultaneously.

If you have information to add to this page or need assistance, please email me at sjblake@growingstrong.org.

Return to the language study page.