- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 12:34:03 -0500 (EST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
to follow up on what Pawson, David said: > > Its when we don't tag them up that we are into guessing games. > Right tagging will support right treatment [which is where this > thread started if I remember rightly]. > > regards, DaveP. If we want access to the information, we need to be open to solutions based on informed interpretation of words as well as scrupulous tagging. Syntax-based guessing that a word is an acronym or initialism is a piece of cake. Is the word all uppercase? {if yes: Is the context all uppercase? {if no: Bingo!}} So client software functions compete with server markup to fill this need. We shouldn't prune off alternative opportunities for relief until the problem has actually gone away. In the WAI-UI group I would think that the speech-access community should be pushing the browser people as to how they use and share dictionaries. The access adapter is not the only piece of software that may have access to a dictionary. In fact, if we want authors to ever employ the distinction between "acronyms" and "initialisms" we had better infiltrate the spell-check dictionaries of popular word processors and not stop at screen-readers. If the system interpreting the HTML has a resident dictionary it can do a very good job of recognizing acronyms and commonly used initialisms and attaching phonetic markup for the ones where the normal pronunciation practices don't work. The screen reader doesn't need to know whether the author or the browser pasted the phonetics on the item. Or it may know it can check the installed word-processor's dictionary that the system has told it is available on the system side of the accessibility API. As Dave and Jason and Max have all pointed out, there are more customers for pronunciation information that just screen readers. Participate in WAI-UI and ask the holders of dictionaries how they propose to share them. Al Gilman
Received on Monday, 2 February 1998 12:34:23 UTC