Re: identifying language changes

I've not seen any pauses.  In my experience, language changes are smooth if 
a bit shocking at times because they are somewhat unexpected.  This is with 
Jaws8.0 and also with k1000

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christophe Strobbe" <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: identifying language changes




At 19:45 18/07/2008, Andy Mabbett wrote:

>In message <6.2.5.6.2.20080717162554.03f77770@esat.kuleuven.be>,
>Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be> writes
>
>>Several people provided arguments against marking up language
>>changes for each foreign name and word.
>>
>>One person said that frequent language changes were judged as
>>annoying or even a hindrance in many tests with blind users (what's
>>wrong now, why is there a pause?).
>
>Surely there are more reasons for marking up language changes than
>just to cater for speech-synthesiser users?

My first response to Armand Turpel also mentioned braille conversion.

>What about as an aid to spell-checking, search optimisation, and 
>translation?

I was well aware of the argument related to spell-checking. The
German screen-reader user that I quoted in one of my previous mails
didn't believe that this argument was plausible or important enough.
He didn't say why; maybe it is because it puts the  convenience of
the author before the convenience of certain groups of users.

I can see the advantage of marking up the primary language of a page
for search optimization (although search engines continue to give me
pages other languages than the one I request) but how does a web
search engine exploit language markup for spans of text inside a document?

With regard to translation, are there any translation tools that make
use of language markup of spans of text?


>Who's top say that the next version of whichever user-agent pauses
>at such a change. won't be fixed?

I hope they will. I merely transmitted comments by people whose
native language is not English. My motivation is that
language-related issues are rather badly covered in accessibility
documents produced by native speakers of English.

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe


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Christophe Strobbe
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Received on Friday, 18 July 2008 18:37:46 UTC