Re: Unicode and accessibility

At 13:25 2004-04-04, Jesper Tverskov wrote:
>The above is just one example of problems or challenges for accessibility 
>arising from or made more common by the use of Unicode.

Personally, I think the reference to Unicode is a bit of a red herring.

It's perfectly possible to use (have to use) Unicode on a single-language 
page (for instance when you need a range of mathematical symbols but write 
in French). It's also perfectly possible to have a page with several 
languages (though depending on the *set* of languages) while using a single 
8-bit character set (like ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 could be used to 
combine French, Dutch and Spanish on a single page).

The real problem you seem to refer to is multiple languages on a single 
page, and whether (or how) language change within a page should be 
communicated to the client or its user.

That problem is not caused by the use of Unicode, as seems to be implied; 
rather, Unicode can be part of the solution. If any tool is going to do 
language guessing (whether at the author's end or the client's end), the 
presence of specific characters (code positions) may help in that guessing 
- at least when characters are needed and used that don't all fit in a 
single 8-bit character set.

[P.S. I'd appreciate it if you could post in plain text rather than HTML!]



--
Marjolein Katsma
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Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 03:25:48 UTC