- From: Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:39:24 +0100
- To: Ben 'Cerbera' Millard <cerbera@projectcerbera.com>
- CC: HTMLWG <public-html@w3.org>
Ben 'Cerbera' Millard wrote: > If italicising this text is sufficient for sighted users to tell they > are "special" terms, why would unsighted users need anything extra? I don't know : perhaps they (or "some of they") wouldn't. But the mondegreen [1] is specifically an aural phenomenon, and there is (AFAIK) no visual equivalent, at least for non-dyslexic readers. > ATs could read <i> in a slightly different voice. Or just read it normally > and let the surrounding context make clear it's a special term, similar > to what a sighted user of a monochrome display would experience. Yes, they could. But the universe of renderings available to screen renderers is considerably richer than that available to aural renderers, so whilst I might (say) have an introductory gloss that says "All ship names appear in blue italics, foreign words and phrases in grey italics, Linnaean binomials in red italics and book titles in black italics", I would be hard pressed to have a similar introduction to the aural version, and that task would become ever harder as the number of distinct italicised entities increased. [snip] > I think we should gather feedback from users over the coming years to > see wheat the real problems are. My suspicion is that super-fine > granularity of markup is an issue of theoretical purity and does not > affect real users in day-to-day browsing. But that is just a suspicion. You speak of "theoretical purity" as if it has negative connotations, and there I do not agree : we r\^ole -- it is a HyperText /Markup/ Language, and what I am seeking to suggest is that there needs to be a way to express subtleties /in the markup/; I am not for one minute suggesting that every author (or every document) would need to make use of this, but if we provide the mechanism, then it is there for others to exploit as they see fit or find necesssary. To summarise : the differentiation between a book title, a loan word, the name of a ship and a Linnaean binomial /may/ be important in some documents, and for those documents, there needs to be a means to express the distinction in HTML. This is true no matter at which medium the document is targetted : visual, aural, braille, or any other. However, the aural medium has associated difficulties [1] for which no equivalent exists in the visual medium, and it was therefore with aural clients specifically in mind that I raised the issue on this occasion. Philip TAYLOR -------- [1] A "mondegreen" is a mis-hearing, usually resulting in comic effect, and takes its name from Sylvia Wright's mis-hearing a line from the folk song /The Bonny Earl of Moray/; the original reads : > They hae slain the Earl of Moray, > And laid him on the green whilst Sylvia Wright heard, and subsequently described in an essay entitled /The Death of Lady Mondegreen/ published in Harper's Magazine in November, 1954: > They hae slain the Earl Amurray, > And Lady Mondegreen." As a child, I experienced exactly the same problem when hearing other children sing "Who would truvalesy" at morning prayers, and I asked my parents what the verb "to truvalesy" meant; they had no idea, but when I sang it to them they realised that what I /should/ have heard was "Who would true valour see" (from /He who would valiant be/, Bunyam, 1684).
Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 11:39:44 UTC