RE: Report for ISOC IL FTF

Hi Lisa,

> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of lisa seeman
> Sent: 22 December 2003 05:55

<snip>

> passages or fragments of text occurring within the content 
> that are written in a language other than the primary natural 
> language of the content as a whole, are identifiable, either 
> through the character encoding used or through direct 
> including specification of the language of the passage or 
> fragment. [X] 

Character encoding information helps you know the script, which may be
useful for font selection or some other rendering considerations, but
doesn't help you with selecting the right voice for pronunciation of the
text.  For example, ASCII text could just as easily be Indonesian or
Malaysian as English.  Text using 'Latin1' characters could represent a
very wide range of languages. So 'either through the character encoding
used' would be inappropriate, unfortunately.

To help me better understand the issue, could you briefly characterise
for me the type of content that causes the problem?  Is it English? How
much of it is there (as a very rough average)?  Is much of it acronyms?
proper names? technical words? etc.

Exploring solutions: can one assume that Israeli text to speech systems
can deal pretty well with the embedded non-Hebrew stuff?  Does that
apply to the tts systems dealing with other languages?  If Hebrew
systems deal with English ok, maybe you'd only have to label stuff that
was, say, Indonesian or Malay??

RI

Received on Monday, 22 December 2003 06:51:13 UTC