- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:59:47 +0200
- To: <public-html@w3.org>
At 12:39 +0100 UTC, on 2007-08-31, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote: [...] > > 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 Maybe (I haven't researched speech possibilities enough to judge). But this seems to bypass what a user can actually digest. The visual presentation you suggest here is similar to syntax colouring. And most of us here probably agree that it takes some getting used to a particular syntax colouring scheme, and then still it's only an aid; we still also rely on knowledge of the programming language, we look at the context, etc. So I think the visual presentation in your example would only be useful to *very* few people. Probably only the few specialists on the subject at hand, and then still assuming they are accustomed to that particular visual presentation. For a wider audience, such presentation can help, but shouldn't be the only indicator. The (con)text will need to be provide good hints. And once that's the case, I wonder if the possible variations of aural presentation would really be too limited. [...] > 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. In principle I agree, but in practice I wonder where to draw the line. I'm inclined to think that @class is 'good enough' for this. UAs can make the class value available to users (that they don't is just a UA bug IMO). And authors can provide a legend to their sites, that explain class names. Authors can suggest a presentation, and users can choose to override that with user CSS. The latter seems reasonable to me at least in cases where a site is visited regularly by a user, and the site's author has bothered to use descriptive class names and to provide a legend explaining them. Obviously the assumption here is [1] that UAs make it easy for users to write user CSS (a good UA provides a uuser-friendly UI for that, so that users do not have to learn CSS), and [2] that UAs allow users to define user CSS to apply to a specific site/domain/section/page. Another thing that UAs could do to make users' life easier is to allow the selection of analternate StyleSheet to be persistent across a site. (Well, AFAIK they don't yet offer that. Maybe some do?) That would make authoring of alternate Style Sheets much more worth an author's time. > 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] A "mondegreen" is a mis-hearing, usually resulting in comic > effect Wouldn't the best way to convey such a thing be to provide an audio file? Something like his: <audio src="ladymondegreen.ogg"><pre>They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen.</pre></audio> <pre>They hae slain the Earl of Moray, And laid him on the green</pre> -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 16:03:55 UTC