[Techniques] 3.1 and cascading dictionaries

As gregg has noted, some of the success criteria for Guideline 3.1
assume the availability of cascading dictionaries.  
 
There is a site called OneLook that may meet this need. It claims to
index over 6 million words in over 900 dictionaries.  It can be
customized in various ways.  They also provide several mechanisms for
linking to the service, including a bookmark link that prompts for the
search term and HTML code that can be freely incorporated into any page,
and modified to match the look and feel of the page into which it's
incorporated. It's also possible to constrain the search to a specific
dictionary.
 
http://www.onelook.com/
 
I entered the word "polyglot" into the search form, and OneLook found 21
dictionaries that contain English definitions of the word. When I told
it to look for translations it found 9 translating dictionaries that
contained translations. When I told it to search all dictionaries it
reported 31 dictionaries that contained definitions of the word.  (When
I searched for the word "file," OneLook found 94 dictionaries containing
definitions, including English-Italian and Italian-English [see
Michelle's message about the complications of this word in Italian
text]).
 
One of the dictionaries listed is the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which
can also be downlodaed via anonymous ftp. This is described as a
machine-readable pronouncing dictionary for North American English that
contains over 125,000 words. There are 39 phonemes. (Great for North
American English! But I'm not sure about pronunciation for other
languages.)
 
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.ital.utexas.edu/>
http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility