Re: Web Browser Preferences and Internationalisation/Accessibility

On Nov 18, 2009, at 7:00 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

>
> Indeed, Safari doesn't allow any user preferences that are
> safari-specific, but instead contains in navigator.language the system
> preference.
>
> This to me this signifies that there are even more problems with
> browser cross-compatibility of language settings. And when we approach
> captions and audio descriptions, we will only further extend this
> problem.
>
> I actually think that the IE approach is the best: it differentiates
> between the OS setting, the browser setting and the Web page
> preferences and lets javascript developers retrieve all of these and
> react accordingly. If Safari/Webkit and several others do not
> distinguish between OS and Web page preferences, then they should
> simply report the same value for these.
>
> A unified interface for language setting API across browsers certainly
> should be in the interest of everyone, no?

Is there a need to expose any setting to the Web page other than the  
language preference for Web content? In Safari, it's unlikely we'll  
ever have three separate language preferences, but even if we did, I  
can't see why Web content would care about the OS language or the  
browser language if they are different from the language to be used in  
Web pages.

Regarding captions and audio descriptions: is it really necessary to  
specify a preferred language? What's the use case for having those in  
a different language than your preferred language for Web content? Are  
there users who have different language preferences the text of the  
Web page, video captions, and audio descriptions? It seems like "want"  
and "don't want" are the only relevant settings for those.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 19 November 2009 03:10:57 UTC