- From: Tom Croucher <tcroucher@netalleynetworks.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 13:59:50 +0100
- To: "'P.H.Lauke'" <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>, "'WAI Interest Group'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
This topic has been discussed without resolution (to my knowledge) by the WCAG techniques group. Part of the problem is the large additional markup involved. There was also talk about semantically disambiguating words using a system like opencyc or wordnet but this just wouldn't work for several reasons. Perhaps the best solution would be to allow authors a pronunciation "style sheet" if you will. Each special word of a document and its phonic description is marked up at the top of the document, perhaps giving UAs a chance to save pronunciations. This is still a problem issue since different people pronounce words differently, and puns and other word play art forms may loose their subtly. For example WCAG is pronounced "w-kag" by most people who use it regularly where as most other folks call it "double-u, see, ay, gee". Tom Croucher Co-founder Netalley Networks (http://www.netalleynetworks.com), BSc(Hons) Computing Student / Information Services Staff University of Sunderland (http://www.sunderland.ac.uk), Accessibility Co-ordinator Plone CMS (http://www.plone.org) -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of P.H.Lauke Sent: 24 September 2003 13:39 To: WAI Interest Group Subject: RE: Helping Jaws (et al) pronounce our company name > Generally though, I think I'd prefer the idea of pushing this > onto the CSS level. Couldn't agree more. On the specific subject of "Unum": being a latin word, would marking it up as such, with something like <span lang="la">Unum</span>, help the screenreader along with its pronunciation ? Slightly off topic, but: phonetically, I think "unum" should actually be read out "uh-num", not "you num". Then again, this is a debate I've been having for ages with some of my english-speaking friends...but it appears that they always use a very "anglicised" pronunciation, when it should actually be more closely related to today's neo-latin languages such as italian (so "unum" sounding very similar to the italian for one, "uno"). ...but I digress Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk
Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2003 09:00:22 UTC