Re: First draft of ARIA 1.1. "text" role

> On Nov 11, 2014, at 6:20 AM, White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org> wrote:
> 
>> Are there legitimate use cases for this role that do not involve replacing text in order to enhance a spoken rendering? Obviously, attempts to enhance braille rendering via this mechanism would be equally problematic for speech output. The difficulty is a general one.

I don't think this is specific to speech rendering. The author may not want the image role conveyed to braille display either. Another example is gaiji.

Quoting from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Gaiji

> Gaiji (外字), literally meaning "external characters", are kanji that are not represented in existing Japanese encoding systems. These include variant forms of common kanji that need to be represented alongside the more conventional glyph in reference works, and can include non-kanji symbols as well.
> 
> Gaiji can be either user-defined characters or system-specific characters. Both are a problem for information interchange, as the codepoint used to represent an external character will not be consistent from one computer or operating system to another.

Gaiji historically consisted of images of text characters since character sets were incomplete. Thankfully unicode solved most of the need for these images, but gaiji is still used for user-defined custom characters like company names or even something like Prince's "the artist formerly known as" symbol.

I did not include the gaiji example in the spec notes because I thought it would be too esoteric.

James

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2014 02:37:36 UTC