Re: Response to i18n on Issue 144

Very well written and thought out.

I think some of this highlighted below should also go into our specification in the Symbols section to help with the understanding on how Symbols are used.

Thanks
Charles
EOM

Charles LaPierre
Principal, Accessibility Standards, and Technical Lead, Global Certified Accessible
Benetech
Twitter: @CLaPierreA11Y



On Apr 5, 2022, at 1:40 AM, Lionel Wolberger <lionel@userway.org<mailto:lionel@userway.org>> wrote:

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.
[https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1lTmh0NemstqEtf_RzlGZvzGa-8QlCS4f&revid=0BzNhq44zrVUWRm5XMzNyRUxsdTFsNEhxaS9SV0RSSHBBUER3PQ]

Lionel Wolberger
COO, UserWay Inc.
lionel@userway.org<mailto:lionel@userway.org>
UserWay.org<http://userway.org/>
<https://userway.org/>[text]