Response to i18n on Issue 144

Sharing to the list for convenience: you may see the full thread at
https://github.com/w3c/personalization-semantics/issues/144

Thanks to Janina and everyone on last call for helping draft this.


Personalization TF and APA-WG thank you for this response, and the details
of SVO and VSO which we were not aware of. However, as you will see below,
this concern does not seem critical. AAC is used for procedural texts, and
the markup shared above--not the rendering, the markup--shows symbol order
is preserved under LTR or RTL.

To be clear, I quote r12a and respond issue by issue:

[r12a wrote] *Thank you for the recipe example. Unfortunately, we still
struggled a little.... A sentence or two that show how such different
syntaxes would be handled would be useful.*

[TF Response] There is a critically important reason why we marked up a
recipe and not a sentence. We did this on advice received from multiple AAC
experts, as follows: AAC is most used on short texts, procedural texts or
instructions. For lengthier discursive or narrative texts, AAC users nearly
universally turn to audio and video. No AAC expert that we consulted with
knew of an AAC user that would want AAC on every word of a story, article
or web page: when they have a lot to read, they have it read to them by an
assistive technology or turn to an audio or video alternative source.

[r12a wrote] *We see that the images in... do show different orders for the
images in the English and Arabic..... We were looking for confirmation of
whether that matches your expectation....*

[TF Response] The Content Module specification stipulates markup, not
rendering. Rendering is at the discretion of the user-agent or other
technologies downstream and is not in scope of the specification. Matatk
shared a possible rendering, and r12a's comment addresses this -- but all
of this was provided only as a convenience and is out of scope of the
specification. The HTML markup associates a symbol to one or more words, at
the discretion of the page's author. This association of symbol to text is
unaffected by LTR or RTL of the marked up content.

[r12a wrote] *Here we were also disadvantaged because we don't read Hebrew
and couldn't even copy the text into a translator...*

[TF Response] We sympathize! It was not easy for our TF to scrounge up AAC
experts fluent in RTL languages as well as native speakers for an accurate
translation. We did just that, at no small effort, to share the
representative sample above, the HTML marked up recipe. We repeat that this
HTML sample is available to i18n since beginning of December 2021.

We conclude with the conclusion above: Notice how symbol order is
preserved: the IDs appear in the same sequence, but this time they are
associated with words that will render RTL.


Lionel Wolberger
COO, UserWay Inc.
lionel@userway.org
UserWay.org <http://userway.org/>
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