RE: Trip report - WebXTutti, Italy

Nissen, Dan E wrote:

> Here is the referenced document in html.

I think people generally prefer URLs to attachments. This is an
accessibility issue too. Think about the time and cost needed to load an
attachment when your E-mail works over a GSM connection, for example, and
the E-mail program has been set to download all new messages.
 
> It is small enough so we can handle the text, I hope.  But, 
> it is still in
> Italian, so I can't get too much from it.  Any volunteer translators?

Well, the first question is whether we have the original author's permission
to distribute and translate the document. The document appears to contain
interesting points, but it would probably be much more useful if expanded
from lists of items to somewhat longer running text with explanations.

Anyway, when I fed the HTML document (which has apparently been created by
saving a Word document in "HTML" or "Web" format) to the Systranet
translator
http://www.systranet.com/systran/net
I noticed, in addition to some other problems, that the translator was
unable to translate simple words like "Sulla" in some contexts - because
they were immediately preceded by bullet characters in Windows encoding,
assumably confusing the translator.

I think this illustrates how seemingly innocent tricks in markup or in the
use of characters may have impact on accessibility. (Automatic
translatability is an accessibility issue too, since it helps to get over
language barriers to some extent.)

-- 
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399 

Received on Monday, 10 June 2002 08:58:28 UTC