- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charlesn@sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>
- Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 19:23:54 +1000 (EST)
- To: WAI <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, WAI PF group <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
Having access to material in an appropriate language is an Accessibility issue, but I am not sure if wai-ig is the right place to discuss it, or if it belongs more properly in the i18n domain somewhere (can someone more official help us out?) Anyway, I am bringing the issue back to the list (after a few hours). My concerns come from two areas. One is the use of CD-ROM, disc, Zip, etc to provide websites. This is a common technique, as it means a large amount of material can be easily used offline as well as having access to further material online. Sunrise Research Laboratory has produced more than 20 000 such CDs which are used in schools throughout Australia. Being able to carry multilingual information and have it properly dealt with would be a Good Thing (TM) for such collections. The second concern, although much more widespread, is based on my assumption that the vast majority of web authors do not have control over their webservers, and cannot 'force' language negotiation to be carried out. I don't know if this applies to GeoCities and their ilk, but it certainly applies to many public and private service organisations in Australia. Part of the problem is a lack of skills on the part of sysadmins, but the need for someone to manage the server is greater than the ready availability of affordable and skilled sysadmins, a situation which doesn't sppear likely to improve in the near future. One suggestion has been the use of <LINK REL="alternate" LANG="xx" HREF="this.de.htm"> (or something like it). This would solve the problem nicely, but needs to be implemented by browsers. The use of HTTP-EQUIV seems a difficult way to solve this problem, since I don't know that there is an http-header that can redirect selectively based on language. So we will always have a legacy problem, but it is one that ought to be solved for the future. At the moment there is a mish-mash of solutions, with some languages relying on font remapping (Vietnamese) and others using full character sets (Chinese, Japanese and Korean, often written CJK). Any thoughts? Charles McCathieNevile (In the meantime, I use HTTP-EQUIV to specify charsets sometimes, and other times I specify a font like .VnTime, and let it default to ISO-8859-1)
Received on Wednesday, 2 September 1998 05:47:25 UTC