- From: Lisa Seeman <seeman@netvision.net.il>
- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 05:30:16 -0700
- To: "'Martin Duerst'" <duerst@w3.org>, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org, w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org
please take a look at my summary at http://ubaccess.com/hebrew-access.html It goes through the issue from beginning to end, but reaches a different conclusion. As I did not find a tool usable by people with no vision that addresses this problem, and as tools that are for low vision require dexterity and are extremely expensive. I thought that the burden of vowels was still at the author end All the best, Lisa Seeman UnBounded Access Widen the World Web http://www.UBaccess.com -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Martin Duerst Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 10:15 PM To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org; w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org Subject: Fwd: RE: update on hebrew and arabic Dear WAI and I18N groups, I'm forwarding this from some internal discussion: >From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org> >Lisa Seeman has come up with some very good leads, in particular >http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~erelsgl/bxi/hmntx/teud_tokna.html#English, >where the software seems to be open source. > >Rates such as 95% sound quite good; that may be about the rate >at which the results are 'bearable' (unfortunately, >many people in the accessibility area are used to 'bear' one >or the other problem). Ordinary Hebrew text sometimes uses vowel >points for disambiguation; it would be interesting to know >whether these cases correspond in any way to the cases where >the programs have difficulties. > >Another interesting thing to investigate would be to >see what Hebrew/Arabic Braille do. If they use some >equivalents of diacritic vowels, then this means that >we have the same problem with braille transcription. >If they don't, then this means that many blind people >may be used to figure out the vowels themselves, which >may mean that lower correctness rates, or even just >reading with dummy vowels (like classic Egyptian texts :-) >could work. > >Please note that English also has ambiguities (read/read), >and similar for many other languages. How would English be >handled in the present guidelines? > >As for Arabic having many more possibilities and therefore >being more difficult, I think there is a misunderstanding. >The number of diacritic vowels is much smaller in Arabic >(3) than in Hebrew (about 10). There are other ways to >create more different word forms (pre/suffixes, long >vowels that are written like consonants), and that may >have been counted. I think the problem for Arabic should >be similar in complexity, or even easier. > >Earlier, we have considered the following solutions: > >1) Pushing fully vocalized texts. >2) Asking the Unicode consortium for a second series > of 'hidden' vowel signs, not displayed usually. >3) Pushing annotations (<ruby>, something like alt,...) >4) Using technology, and hoping that it is advanced > enough and will advance further. > >Given Lisa's findings, and the problems we would have >with getting any of 1) to 3) accepted in practice, >things seem to point to 4). If the new guidelines >can be written in a way that encourages both research >and business to follow that direction, that would >probably be best. > >Regards, Martin.
Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2002 07:32:27 UTC