UAWG response to I18N review of UAAG 1.0

Richard,

On behalf of the UAWG, I would like to thank you for the I18N
WG's review [1] of UAAG 1.0 as well as your own comments [2]. I
have already replied to your personal comments [3], which I
believe to be editorial. From that series, I will incorporate
your suggestion regarding checkpoint 2.2 (#ri-4) and a
clarification about the section numbering.

Please review this email and let us know whether you are
satisfied with how the UAWG proposes to address your issue. A
response before 4 October would be appreciated; let us know if
you require extra time.

Thank you,

  - Ian

UAWG decisions were made at the 26 Sep 2002 teleconf:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2002JulSep/0173

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2002JulSep/0170
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2002JulSep/0151
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2002JulSep/0158

===============================

The UAWG divided issues into substantive and editorial.
I will incorporate your editorial suggestions i18n-3 and i18n-4.

------------------
Substantive issues
------------------

You wrote:

   #i18n-1:

   Checkpoint 2.10, checkpoint provision 1 The heading talks about
   'language' whereas the checkpoint provision talks about
   'scripts (ie. Writing systems)'.  Both the title and text
   should be changed to 'language or script', to cover both the
   visual rendering case and the text-to-speech (or -to-braille)
   case.

UAWG reply to issue 552:
   http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/issues/issues-linear-lc4.html#552

Summary:

The UAWG agrees with the spirit of your suggestion. However,

  * In light of the UAWG's original intent that this checkpoint
    be about graphical rendering (screen readers scraping garbage
    rendered characters), and
  * In the face of no implementation experience for text-to-speech
    and text-to-braille rendering,

the UAWG proposes to fix the title and reduce the scope of
the checkpoint to 'script' only.

Proposed title:

  2.10 "Don't render text in unsupported writing systems".

Proposed addition to the start of the first provision: "For
graphical user agents, ..."

The UAWG proposes to make your point about other renderings in
the "Doing more" section of the Techniques document.

===

  #i18n-2:
  Checkpoint 2.10, checkpoint provision 1

  Is it clear enough how one would know that text is in an
  'unsupported script' or language?  Whether or not something can
  be rendered would presumably depend on the capabilities of the
  application in a given modality, eg. font availability in a
  visual modality (without necessarily a requirement to understand
  the underlying semantics if this is a visual illustration);
  recognisability of text (words) in a text-to-speech modality
  (without necessarily a requirement to be able to display the
  text).

  Detection of an unsupported script or language would presumably
  be significantly aided by recognition of markup indicating a
  language, or recognition of a range of Unicode code points
  (eg. the set of Latin characters used in Welsh or African
  languages) that are known not to be supported. Perhaps,
  therefore, it would be worthwhile to add another requirement
  along the lines of: "Ensure recognition of any cues provided in
  markup relating to a change of language or script." Examples
  would include xml:lang in XHTML, :lang in CSS, lang in HTML,
  etc.

  Note that there is no markup at the moment in xml or html that
  indicates a change of script, and there may never be.  The text
  'or script' was included above to cover any possibility of such
  a thing occurring in a future implementation, given the
  assumption that the guidelines are also aimed at people
  developing new technologies.

UAWG reply:

  You are correct: whether something is supported depends on
  the capabilities of the user agent.

  a) If the user agent cannot recognize language information
     from the content, the user agent is not responsible
     for satisfying the requirement; see the section on
     "applicability". This conformance provision essentially
     states (for a small set of circumstances): if the UA
     can't recognize the information, it will not be penalized.

     This first point relates to your second paragraph.

     You suggest an additional checkpoint to "ensure recognition
     of markup cues". This requirement is covered by our
     checkpoint 2.1: to render content according to specification
     (including I18N features).

  b) If the user agent recognizes language information but
     doesn't support its rendering, this checkpoint applies.

The UAWG believes no change to the document is required.

===

You wrote:

  #i18n-5:

  Checkpoint 4.2 Since global imposition of a Latin-only font
  could break text in other scripts, perhaps this should be
  finessed to say that it should be possible for the user to
  specify different user preferred fonts by script group (much
  like eg. the common browsers allow you to set default fonts for
  Unicode ranges).

UAWG reply to issue 553
   http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/issues/issues-linear-lc4.html#553

The UAWG felt that, while certainly touching accessibility
issues, this proposal is more of an I18N requirement than an
accessibility requirement. Given a user agent that supports
N scripts, an internationalized user agent should allow
configuration of font family on a per-script basis.

"Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0" addresses formats
more than user agent behavior. I note that the I18N WG
charter [4] refers to possible I18N guidelines:

   "Audience may include content authors, programmers, webmasters,
   creators of tools (web servers, authoring tools, user
   agents,...), creators of DTDs/Schemas, and so on. The same
   guideline may be addressed to more than one category of
   audience."

It seems appropriate that this type of requirement (per-script
font family configuration) be part of a "User Agent
Internationalization Guidelines".

Due to the advanced status of UAAG 1.0, the UAWG proposes not to
include this new requirement, but instead to make the point in
the Techniques Document.

[4] http://www.w3.org/2002/05/i18n-recharter/WG-charter

-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

Received on Saturday, 28 September 2002 17:57:50 UTC