RE: tags and titles to make text clear?

Roberto writes:
<blockquote>
So, where we said: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-GENERAL/meaning-other-lang-id.html

The natural language of each foreign passage or phrase in the content can be programmatically determined. [I] 
NOTE: This requirement does not apply to individual words or to phrases that have become part of the primary language of the content.

We want to said: don't mark these words?
</blockquote>

I think Roberto is correct. It's my understanding that, as written, this SC (GL 3.1 L2 SC1) does *not* require marking language changes for individual words or for phrases that have effectively been absorbed into the primary language of the content. There was substantial discussion about this on the list some time ago, with many people arguing that such a requirement would be virtually impossible for authors writing in some languages to meet-- there are languages that use "foreign" words very heavily-- but they borrow the *words* without borrowing their pronunciation as well.

John

"Good design is accessible design."

Dr. John M. Slatin, Director 
Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin 
FAC 248C 
1 University Station G9600 
Austin, TX 78712 
ph 512-495-4288, fax 512-495-4524 
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu 
Web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility 



-----Original Message-----
From: public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org [mailto:public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Roberto Scano - IWA/HWG
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 3:09 AM
To: lisa@ubaccess.com; public-wcag-teamb@w3.org
Subject: R: tags and titles to make text clear?




-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org [mailto:public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org] Per conto di Lisa Seeman
Inviato: mercoledì 14 settembre 2005 9.52
A: public-wcag-teamb@w3.org
Oggetto: tags and titles to make text clear?


This is from LD web



Add tags and titles to make text clear
HTML contains tags and attributes that can be used to give extra information about text. 
Translations
If you are using quotes or text in a different language , you can provide translations by filling in the title of a lang tag. 
HTML example
She came in the room with a certain <SPAN lang="fr' title="style and pananse'>je ne sais quoi</SPAN>. 

Roberto Scano:
We are having a discussion in an italian forum (more than 160 posts) about "different language" and "change of language". I think that we need to clarify what we intend.

I've got my theory:

HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0
W3C Working Draft 30 June 2005

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/#lang-att_change

Similarly, speech synthesizers that "support" multiple languages will be able to speak the text in the appropriate accent with proper pronunciation. If changes are not marked, the synthesizer will try its best to speak the words in the primary language it works in. Thus, the French word for car, "voiture" would be pronounced "voter" by a speech synthesizer that uses English as its primary language.

Marking changes in language can benefit future developments in technology, for example users who are unable to translate between languages themselves will be able to use machines to translate unfamiliar languages.

As resource is cited: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/

In the paragraph marked as "by the way..."

"by the way..."

"Language tags for HTML were first formally defined in RFC 2070, F. Yergeau, et.al. Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language. RFC 2070 was incorporated into HTML 4, and has been reclassified as historic."

>From point 3 of RFC 2070:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2070.txt

"Language tags can be used to control rendering of a marked up document in various ways: glyph disambiguation, in cases where the character encoding is not sufficient to resolve to a specific glyph; quotation marks; hyphenation; ligatures; spacing; voice synthesis; etc. "

So, for example, if i use in italian a word like "hardware", "touché", etc. that are now in italian dictionary but are not in the screen reader dictionary (due that are words from other dictionary), I think that the words should be marked.

"Independently of rendering issues, language markup is useful as content markup for purposes such as classification and searching."

This is another point that - IMHO - ask that all words that come from other dictionaries should be marked.

Moving ahead to another RFC from IETF:  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt

In markup languages, such as HTML and XML, language information can be added to each part of the document identified by the markup structure (including the whole document itself). For example, one could write <span lang="FR">C'est la vie.</span> inside a Norwegian document; the Norwegian-speaking user could then access a French- Norwegian dictionary to find out what the marked section meant. If the user were listening to that document through a speech synthesis interface, this formation could be used to signal the synthesizer to appropriately apply French text-to-speech pronunciation rules to that span of text, instead of misapplying the Norwegian rules.

So I ask, also for clarification for the user of WCAG: what we intend for change of language? 

So, where we said: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-GENERAL/meaning-other-lang-id.html

The natural language of each foreign passage or phrase in the content can be programmatically determined. [I] 
NOTE: This requirement does not apply to individual words or to phrases that have become part of the primary language of the content.

We want to said: don't mark these words?

Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 13:30:48 UTC