Pictures of text or international characters? Re: [w3c-wai-ig] <none>

Modern computers solve this - an off-the-shelf Macintosh will render 
many languages without worrying.

This includes Latin characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese (complex 
accents), korean, chinese (simplified and traditional), arabic, hebrew 
and hindi (you can test all these at once on 
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/ - a list of translations of 
W3C documents).

But not all of them - the Bengali version  of WAI quick tips didn't 
work - http://people.csa.iisc.ernet.in/aroy/inet/wai-quick.bn.html

Using the standard HTML metadata techniques (as required by WCAG 
checkpoint 13.2) in particular the hreflang and rel attributes (both on 
the a element and on the link element) would enable browsers or 
transforming proxies to also include a flag (as chosen by a user), 
text, a picture of something, a simple sound-recording, etc. I would 
recommend that as highly as I recommend using actual text (as per WCAG 
3.1) - even if you also decide to put some kind of picture in (best of 
all worlds perhaps).

cheers

Chaals

On Monday, Sep 29, 2003, at 03:42 US/Pacific, P.H.Lauke wrote:

>
>> since people without
>> suitable fonts are unlikely to be any the wiser if it was
>> rendered correctly.
>
> If you're only going to provide the language name in the specific
> language's representation, then I would say the theory has a flaw:
> how about users browsing from machines that are not theirs (e.g.
> library, internet cafe, etc) and which do not have the necessary
> font installed ? They'd get the garbled representation, but WOULD 
> actually
> be the wiser if they could see the correct font...
>
> Patrick
> ________________________________
> Patrick H. Lauke
> Webmaster / University of Salford
> http://www.salford.ac.uk
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 14:57:26 UTC