- From: Reuven Nisser <rnisser@ofek-liyladenu.org.il>
- Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2004 09:32:15 +0200
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Cc: W3C Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Hello Charles >> For a large number of common kanji, like in Hebrew, there is enough to build >> effective lookup tables (the glossary approach) so they can be pronounced >> correctly by a text to speech engine. But for a large number of other common >> kanji, and more particularly for less common ones, this isn't feasible. >> Something that makes it possible to provide clear interpretation is therefore >> important. One technique is to use clear characters, as used to write simple >> documents pitched at a broad audience. It is preferable in a way that they >> need not be always visible - think of the differences between closed and open >> captioning on television. One question though regarding the attached paragraph. When you look at a single Japanese word is there always a one and only one way to pronounce it? If so, then the problem in Japanese is "only" a lookup table for each word and the phonetic representation. In Hebrew and in Arabic, if you look at a single word, there are in average 2.3 ways to pronounce it. There are even words with 13 ways to pronounce. Each pronunciation has a different meaning. To eliminate several possibilities you need to analyze the sentence grammatically. To eliminate more you need to get to text semantics. For example, S-F-R could be SEFER (book) or SAPAR (barber). Regards, Reuven Nisser Ofek Liyladenu
Received on Friday, 6 February 2004 02:32:33 UTC