Re: How to provide titles and descriptions in a second language?

Robin,

further to Olaf's comments, iirc it is a requirement of SVG that only  
one title be provided.

are there any other comments, as this suggestion of Olaf is significant.

regards


Jonathan Chetwynd

j.chetwynd@btinternet.com
http://www.openicon.org/

+44 (0) 20 7978 1764


On 1 Jul 2008, at 09:19, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:

>
> Robin Berjon:
>> On Jun 30, 2008, at 19:44 , Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
>>> as I discoverd now, the elements title and desc do not have
>>> the attribute systemLanguage in SVG 1.1 and SVGT1.2.
>>>
>>> How to provide (or to switch to) a second language for
>>> title and description without repeating the parent element
>>> of those elements. How to switch the document title and
>>> description?
>>>
>>> Maybe it is useful to add this attribute to title and desc
>>> in SVG 1.2, because often those elements contain the
>>> major part of text in SVG documents and it might be
>>> useful for accessibility reasons to provide those information
>>> in more than one language.
>>
>> Nothing keeps you from providing title and desc in more than one
>> language: simply use the xml:lang attribute to indicate which  
>> language
>> they're in.
>
> xml:lang provides a different information - it just indicates in which
> language the content is, this is no indication of an alternative or
> for whom this information is relevant, obviously authors may
> use it independently from other purposes to avoid plurivalence
> and confusion within the content. In the world today there are
> many loanwords/'xenocism', sometimes even with different
> meanings as in the original language (for example anglicisms
> and pseudo-anglicisms).
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/struct.html#LangSpaceAttrs
>
>
>> Since they do not have any effect on rendering there is no
>> need to switch them,
>
> 'For reasons of accessibility, user agents should always make the  
> content of
> the 'title' child element to the outermost 'svg' element available  
> to users.
> The mechanism for doing so depends on the user agent (e.g., as a  
> caption,
> spoken).'
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/struct.html#DescriptionAndTitleElements
>
> Typically it will not have much use to present titles in any available
> language, if the user already indicates, which languages are only
> understandable for him.
>
> And I think, it would be a much better user agent, if any title and
> desc is somehow accessible in an alternative presentation of the
> document. Typically especially document title and desc provide
> important information about the content of the document, at least
> in almost any of my SVG documents ;o)
>
>
>> just include several, each with their own
>> language. It's up to the UA what happens with them (e.g. showing up  
>> as
>> a tooltip or being read out) so it ought to figure out which one it
>> wants to use.
>
>
> 'It is strongly recommended that at most one 'desc' and at most one  
> 'title'
> element appear as a child of any particular element'
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/struct.html#DescriptionAndTitleElements
>
> A who we are to do it differently as 'strongly recommended'? ;o)
>
> This can be avoided for example with a switch with systemLanguage.
> Otherwise the document will get very abstract, having all elements  
> with
> a need for title and desc inside the defs element and referencing  
> all of
> them with use elements having a switch around to chose the proper
> language.
> And I think, it is much more difficult to interprete such an abstract
> document for an accessibility tool extracting text information only
> or to provide an alternative text view of such a document in general.
> And it does not solve the problem with the document title and desc
> in two or more languages to switch.
>
>
>
>
>