Re: Changes Of Language research

(reviving? a very old thread)

Hi Francis,

this is interesting. There are (unsurprisingly) more cases than screen
readers to take into account.

There are also realities of content that go beyond accessibility. The
ability to localise

Obviously, the requirements don't only apply to english, either.

The question of whether something is in the vernacular is a hard one -
there are many more words from dutch in the vernnacular of South African
english than in Australian english, "magasiner" makes sense in fr-CA but
not in France (nor, *I believe* in Senegal), and standard spanish phrases
that are announcements in Madrid airport are obscenities in Ezeiza airport
in Buenos Aires.

That screen readers can read the language is nice - picking resume is as
useful as knowing the difference between two people sitting in a row, and
two people having a row, or whether you wear a bow or take a bow, whether
you are tearing up with emotion or tearing up a page.

But that's relatively english-centric - very few languages have the same
lack of correspondence between written form and pronuncation; arabic (and
I believe hebrew) can, because in common usage most vowels are not written
and depend on context to infer. Russian depends on accentuation, but it's
pretty much a dictionary exercise without the ambiguity problems.

To look at the examples you gave, IMHO:

- "croissant" (like "resumé") is part of the english vernacular.
- "stroopwafel" generally isn't. Correct dutch pronunciation would only be
used and to some extent even recognised by a small fraction of english
speakers who run across the word (same goes for french pronunciations of
"croissant" but to a lesser extent). Since there isn't an ambiguity, a
lookup for e.g. a symbolic language communicator isn't likely to make a
mistake.
- There isn't a good way to mark up the expansion "train à grande vitesse"
in HTML as having a different language, except by declaring the language
on the abbreviation as well. Which is unfortunate in some ways: Normal
behaviour in english would be to spell out the acronym in english: "Tee
Gee Vee", but the explanation would involve a mixed language phrase.
- Marking up Lavandula is the hardest one - while it is clearly latin, and
not that common (although more so than most names used in Linnaean
taxonomy), it is clearly part of the scientific vernacular. However,
marking it up helps translation - it is equally part of the vernacular of
many languages to use the latin term as is, while the rest of the content
is in a different language and would therefore be translated.
- The french phrases in an english-language page should be marked as
french.

On Sat, 18 Dec 2021 07:33:27 +0100, Storr, Francis
<francis.storr@intel.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> I'm part of a small group that's working on a very-early exploratory  
> draft of Programmatic Language for WCAG 3.0. We've been >looking at WCAG  
> 2.x’s Language Of Parts criterion and have been trying to find research  
> on changes of language.
> What we're looking for is research on where a change of language should  
> be identified and where it wouldn't be.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> We have been discussing the existing WCAG 2 "words or phrases that have  
> become part of the vernacular of the immediately >surrounding text"  
> exception, but we're also wondering about improvements in screen  
> readers, where they can correctly
> pronounce words based on their context of use. For example: without any  
> extra markup, VoiceOver correctly changes the >pronunciation of the word  
> "resume" in the sentence "I asked Charlotte to send me her resume; I  
> asked Paul to resume work".
>
>
>
>
>
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> As technology improves, are there cases where changes in language don't  
> need to be marked up?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 1. "I do like a nice croissant for breakfast" [is croissant part of the  
> vernacular?];
> 2. "There's nothing I like more with my afternoon coffee than a  
> stroopwafel"  [is stroopwafel part of the vernacular? If it >isn’t, does  
> the fact that a screen reader pronounces it well
> negate the word needing to be marked up as Dutch?];
> 3. "I went to France and travelled on a TGV" [where TGV is an  
> abbreviation of Train à Grande Vitesse—should the abbreviation >be  
> marked up as French?];
> 4. "The Latin name for the lavender genus is Lavandula" [should Latin  
> words be marked up as Latin? Very few are part of the >vernacular];
> 5. Ablog post offering a cheat sheet for English speakers to help with  
> ordering at French restaurants [does the context of the >article—that  
> it’s an instructional aid—make it more important to mark up the French  
> phrases as being in French?]
>
>
>
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>
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> If anyone is aware of any research in this area, we would be very  
> interested in it.
>
>
>
>
>
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> Many thanks
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Francis Storr
>
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>



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Received on Sunday, 7 August 2022 19:46:54 UTC