8-bit characters in output

[Martin McCormick]

On many occasions, I hear output while reading text that I think
is probably 8-bit data because certain characters are spoken that
don't even exist in the text I am reading.

	I may be reading quoted text in an email or maybe
highlighted text in instructions and I hear the one-half symbol
which is pronounced by speakup as a half plus the umlaut from
German text.

	Occasionally when printing output that can best be described
as garbage such as accidentally catting a binary file, speakup
starts chanting a half umlaut or even 1fourth followed by umlauts
or other words that turn out to be not words but characters that
trigger speakup to recite symbols for 1/4th, etc.

	I once examined an email message that was heavily in to
a half-umlaut on about every line and found that the other persons
email client placed a circumflex in quoted lines.

	At other times, words like the contraction of "I am" as
in I apostrophe M are read as IBM like the computer
manufacturer.

	Basically, I certainly understand why this is happening
but want to know if there is anything I can do at the speakup
level to properly process text so that it doesn't sound like
corrupted data.

	One thing I did for several years was to filter the
output of text such as email or just text files through a filter
that removed bit 7 if it was set.  This got rid of the
a half-umlaut chant but replaced it with occasional corruption
when an 8-bit character with bit 7 cleared equals a printable
ASCII character.

	This is more of an annoyance than a show stopper so is
there a translation table or a filter that can be made to fix
this issue?

	Speakup is a fabulous system so I'm not griping at all.

	Thanks for either instructions as to what to do or a link
to such instructions.

Martin McCormick