Hi Paul,
Paul Noone wrote:
Thanks for your comments, Andrew.
At least your other reply was of some use.
Just when _did_ this list stop being one of altruistic support for
accessibility issues and become a forum for personal insult?
My deepest apologies Paul, I wasn't meaning to be insulting. Sorry if it
appeared that way.
Just my frustration level at the time I read the email.
When I read your email, I'd just finished doing a first pass of a review
of Australian government websites with translated information, and I was
quite frustrated at the peculiar interpretations of accessibility
standards that seems to be out there.
For instance the number of government sites that have non-English
information (even in languages that use the straight Latin alphabet)
imbeded in GIFs or JPEGs is much higher that I though it would be.
The common practice is to create an image of text for one langauge
audience, and provide the alt attribute text in a totally different
language (ie English). In essence the audience of the document and the
audience of the alt attribute are two discrete groups.
To compound the issue, most translations are provided as PDFs, with
little effort to ensure that the text in the PDF is extractable or
reusable, either by a screen reader, a PDF to HTML conversion process or
even a PDF to TEXT conversion.
Within Australia, It would appear that when it comes to non-English
language content, we tend to throw web standards out of the window.
Although there are some very good examples out there, on the whole there
are many very bad examples.
Again, my apologies. I did not intend to offend.
To explain my comment that may have appear flipant or insulting: back in
mid-90s, using images of text was the only way to provide some
languages on the web, since early web browsers could not render those
languages. Another common practice was to deliberately identify the
wrong encoding for the page and then specify fonts needed to render the
page.
Web browser technologies and web standards have progressed dramatically
since those days. And current use of images to represent non-English
language text does not comply with web standards. I find it unfortunate
that the practie is still used so much within Australia government sites.
Andrew
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham
Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 11:14 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Umm
Paul Noone wrote:
Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your
English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of
characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words
and put the definition in the alt tag.
images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s.
Andrew
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--
Andrew Cunningham
e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions
Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au
Ph. 3-8664-7430
Fax: 3-9639-2175
http://www.openroad.net.au/
http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/
http://www.vicnet.net.au/
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