Re: Techniques suggestions

to follow up on what Masayasu Ishikawa said:

> Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> wrote:
> 
> > > > 7.1 Support accessibility features of HTML
> > > > LANG is priority 3. I would have thought it was 2 at least.
> > > 
> > > As it is priority 2 in the PAGL as well, I will change it
> > > to 2 here if no one protests.
> > 
> > OK, I object.  What is the rationale for how it rates a 2?
> 
> I object again.  I strongly believe it SHOULD be implemented.
> 
> > Seems to me LANG doesn't vary that often and if the user has to
> > tell the Braille software manually what language to expect, for
> > example, that it is not a real show-stopper.
> 
> Have a look at Japanese press release of UA Guidelines.
> 
> 	<http://www.w3.org/Press/1998/WAI-UAGL.html.ja>
> 
> Here you'll see that LANG varies frequently.  I sometimes hear Web
> pages with IBM's Home Page Reader (Japanese version), and have
> difficulties to understand its poor English pronunciation (its
> Japanese pronunciation is pretty good, though).  I very much want
> future version of Home Page Reader (and other voice browsers) support
> better multilingual speech output, but it will be difficult without
> appropriate language information.

OK, I can understand that this issue is more important on a World
Wide basis than in my gut because I operate in a mostly-English,
all-ASCII ghetto.

But I am still concerned on a slightly different, related issue:
What do the guidelines say a User Agent should _do_ with the LANG
information?  What is meant by "implement LANG per HTML 4.0" in
the present context?  It seems to me that LANG is purely
informative as defined by HTML 4.0.  There is no defined behavior
associated with it.  Or is there?

Al

PS: one of the reasons the English pronunciation is worse is not
that the program is written by Japanese speakers but that
Japanese writers write much more phonetically than English
writers do.  Japanese is the "most phonetic" major language so
far as I know.  "Most phonetic" in the sense of "what you write
is what you hear."  Is that true?

> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
> W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
>

Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 10:13:00 UTC