- From: <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:28:14 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
I agree with the AC Member comment that this should be lowered to a priority 3. My rationale: In addition to the rationale that the user agents don't support it today, even if they did, how does that improve accessibility? I agree it improves "international-ability" - my ability to seek a person (or machine) that can interpret the foreign phrase. For example: Home Page Reader (Japanese version) supports both Japanese and English web pages without using the LANG attribute because most pages don't use the LANG attribute. Japanese pages are usually in a different character set even though they have English text. The English text is spoken with a strong Japanese accent by the synthesizer. Home Page reader (international version currently in beta) will support English (U.K. and U.S.) Spanish, French, and German pages (not phrases mid-stream) with and without the LANG attribute. Switching software text-to-speech engines mid-stream is proving very difficult. Hearing a phrase in Japanese and/or seeing the phrase in Japanese does not help me directly if I don't understand Japanese. Helping me understand Japanese is not an "accessibility" issue, but a translation or internationalization issue. Please understand, I support the use of the LANG attribute and hope it's wider adoption will facilitate automated translation techniques - after all I work for an international company. Leaving it in the WCAG document raises this awareness, but leaving it a P1 or P2 misuses the definition and reduces credibility. Regards, Phill Jenkins IBM (International Business Machines) Corporation
Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 16:31:38 UTC