- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:39:52 +1100
- To: public-html <public-html@w3.org>
Hi all, I have a very concrete request and I am not sure that the HTML WG is the right place to solve it, but please bear with me. If we want to improve accessibility and internationalisation support, I believe we need to do something. All modern Web browsers have user preferences and as part of these, you can choose your preferred languages for displaying Web pages. These preferences are different to the language in which your browser's user interface is presented: you can e.g. run your browser in English and still want your Web pages inside the browser preferably to display Japanese or French or some other language over English. Now, not all browsers actually expose this preference setting to Web pages. AFAIK, only Internet Explorer does: IE has: navigator.browserLanguage -> Browser Localized Language navigator.systemLanguage -> Windows OS - Localized Language navigator.userLanguage -> Windows OS - Regional Settings (this is the exposure of preferences) Firefox only has: navigator.language -> only the browser's localized language - no way to get the preference in javascript To detect language preferences in browsers other than IE, you have to analyse the HTTP Request header of the browser, which typically includes something like: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091115 Minefield/3.7a1pre So, the server is told what the preference setting of the Browser is and thus, the Web page can extract this from the HTTP header and work with it. At the recent TPAC, we discussed that to provide better accessibility support for video, we need to be able to read the default language from the browser preference, then also the default setting for displaying captions/subtitles and audio descriptions and react accordingly in the Web page. The HTTP header parsing approach won't work for default caption/subtitle and audio description settings. But the Web pages that are loading will still require to find out about these preference settings. I believe we need to introduce standard javascript functions for such preferences to be exposed to Web pages directly. If a Web page can read, e.g.: navigator.userLanguage -> e.g. set to "de-de" navigator.userCaptions -> e.g. set to "off" or "en-us" navigator.userAudioDescriptions -> e.g. set to "off" or "ja-jp" then it can react accordingly and e.g. display the Web page in German, the captions for videos by default in English, and the audio descriptions by default in Japanese. I think we need this flexibility and we need such javascript interfaces specified and implemented. Is this part of what HTML5 has to do? Best Regards, Silvia.
Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 23:40:53 UTC