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Thread: alt text in 2 languages?

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From: Patrizia Bertini
Date: Wed, Apr 21 2004 8:42AM
Subject: alt text in 2 languages?
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Hi everyone,

I have a doubt: how shall I threat an Alt text which is half in Italian
and half in English?

The case is the following: a company has it's name in Italian (is a
short sentence) and its payoff is instead in english. So inserting the
Alt my doubt was: how can i do the best thing to ensure the best
accessibility? I guess the span lang attribute doesn't work properly in
this case, eventuaally with an xml language declaration? anyone has
already faced and fixed this matter?

Thx:)

Pat

Ps. it'd be too easy to change the Alt, the Custumer absolutely wants
to keep both the name and company payoff in some images and i have to
find out the most suitable solution to combine two langiuages in an alt
attribute.

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From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Wed, Apr 21 2004 8:46AM
Subject: Re: alt text in 2 languages?
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> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a doubt: how shall I threat an Alt text which is half in Italian
> and half in English?
>
> The case is the following: a company has it's name in Italian (is a
> short sentence) and its payoff is instead in english. So inserting the
> Alt my doubt was: how can i do the best thing to ensure the best
> accessibility? I guess the span lang attribute doesn't work properly in
> this case, eventuaally with an xml language declaration? anyone has
> already faced and fixed this matter?

If the name is a brand why translate it or flag up that it is in another
language. I thought the need to flag that up only applies when the
sentences mean something.

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From: julian.rickards
Date: Wed, Apr 21 2004 9:04AM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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The simple answer is that although you can specify the language in the <img>
tag, lang="it", you can't specify two languages in the image tag and most
certainly, you can't specify a change of language in the alt attribute so
therefore, alt must be in one language, whatever you specify for the
document or specifically in the <img> tag.

I wonder however, if (despite the additional effort) you might create an
image map from the image and specify an alt for the two areas with different
lang attributes. From what I read at
http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/a/area.htm, the <area> tag is
not required to use the href attribute so you don't have to create two links
and the <area> tag does allow the lang attribute. So therefore, if your
image in question is a link, you could use:

<a href="some-page.html"><img src="some-image.gif" width="xx" height="xx"
alt="English text" usemap="#italian-alt" lang="en"></a>

<map name="italian-alt">
<area shape="default" lang="it" alt="Italian text">
</map>

---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690

>

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Wed, Apr 21 2004 9:23AM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = wrote:

> The simple answer is that although you can specify the language in the <img>
> tag, lang="it", you can't specify two languages in the image tag and most
> certainly, you can't specify a change of language in the alt attribute

Indeed - this is one of the drawbacks of the principle that the
alternative text is an attribute value, hence plain text. With
<object>, it would be essentially better, but unfortunately <object> is
not a feasible way to embed images now or the next few years.

(_Very_ theoretically, you could indicate changes in language in plain
text using "language tags" as defined in the Unicode standard, i.e. as
control character type data inside a string. But I would be extremely
surprised if any browser even tried supporting that.)

> I wonder however, if (despite the additional effort) you might create an
> image map from the image and specify an alt for the two areas with different
> lang attributes.

Or maybe the image could be split into two images, each with an alt text
of its own?

On the other hand, lang attributes are not very essential in practical
accessibility at present. Few browsers support them at all, and users
probably understand the message even if a speech browser reads an Italian
word by English rules or vice versa.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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From: John Foliot - WATS.ca
Date: Thu, Apr 22 2004 12:02PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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> On the other hand, lang attributes are not very essential in practical
> accessibility at present. Few browsers support them at all, and users
> probably understand the message even if a speech browser reads an Italian
> word by English rules or vice versa.
>

IBM's HomePageReader supports the LANG attribute and will switch language
modules "on-the-fly". I have been told that the latest version of JAWS now
also supports the LANG attribute and will do the switch (although I have not
personally verified this).

In practical terms, adding LANG attributes is not difficult, and is forward
compatible - and IMHO a good idea to implement at the development stage (as
opposed to having to retrofit a site 24 months from now...). For example,
Opera has announced their intent to integrate IBM's voice technologies into
their browser (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/03/23/) - and
since IBM's HPR already supports "on-the-fly" changing, does this mean so
too the next iteration of Opera?

Are there any betting men (or women) out there?

JF
--
John Foliot = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
Web Accessibility Testing and Services
http://www.wats.ca 1.866.932.4878 (North America)

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Apr 22 2004 12:13PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:

> I have been told that the latest version of JAWS now
> also supports the LANG attribute and will do the switch (although I have not
> personally verified this).

That's good news. Can anyone confirm this and give more details, like the
repertoire of languages supported?

> In practical terms, adding LANG attributes is not difficult, and is forward
> compatible - and IMHO a good idea to implement at the development stage (as
> opposed to having to retrofit a site 24 months from now...).

It depends. Using lang="..." for <html> and for large blocks of data, like
block quotations in another language, is very easy. Using language markup
for _all_ changes of languages, as required by the WAI recommendations but
not applied even on WAI pages themselves, is quite complex, both
theoretically, both theoretically and in practice.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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From: julian.rickards
Date: Thu, Apr 22 2004 12:48PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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Cool, just ran a test using JAWS 5 for Windows (40 minute DEMO) on both a
HTML page and an "accessible" PDF.

Using, My name is John. and Je m'appelle
Jean., JAWS read both paragraphs using the proper pronunciation of the
words. However, neither the Read Out Loud accessibility feature in Acrobat
6, nor JAWS when reading the PDF, switched language - there are many
potential accessibility features that PDFs could incorporate but are still
missing.

So, there you have it: both English and French are supported in HTML and
JAWS 5 will switch between them on the fly.

---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690

>

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Apr 22 2004 8:32PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = wrote:

> Using, My name is John. and Je m'appelle
> Jean., JAWS read both paragraphs using the proper pronunciation of the
> words.

Excellent. This helps us to convince authors to use (correct) lang
attributes. The basic idea is simple, but it has been difficult to answer
the question "why bother?".

Since most documents are in one language, I guess the most important part
is to specify the overall language, which is very simply: just put a lang
attribute into the <html> tag. This should make speech synthesis
automatically select the right mode if possible, so that the user does not
need to do the switching manually when moving from one document to
another.

If there are longish pieces of text in a different language, say the
French title of a book you're citing, then it should be marked up using a
suitable lang attribute. This is usually simple and fast too. But for the
best quality, quite some extra work might be needed.

And it's not clear cut what gives the best quality. Consider, for
example, the question "Have you seen Jean's new book?" when
"Jean" refers to a Frenchman. Logically, it seems, this should be marked
up using
Have you seen Jean's new book?
since only the name itself is French, the 's is the genitive suffix in
English. This in turn may cause a break in speech synthesis between the
word and the suffix.

Authoring programs may automatically insert lang attributes, but not
necessarily the right one, e.g. automatically using lang=""en". And
naturally a _wrong_ lang attribute is worse than no lang attribute.

FrontPage, for example, seems to insert a meta tag with
http-equiv="Content-Language" according to its own language settings.
Whether this means specifying the _right_ language depends on whether the
user has selected the right language in the settings, and this is probably
not known to many authors using FP. They have however good reasons for
doing so, since the language settings affect spell checking, so if a wrong
language has been selected, most words will appear with red underlining
(in FP, not on the page itself) indicating suspected misspelling. But
authors might not realize this, and might even have disabled spell
checking as "annoying". Spelling checks are an important accessibility
issue on their own, too, since they directly affect the readability,
especially to people with reading difficulties. (Besides, in speech
synthesis a typo often have drastic effects.)

I wonder if the meta tag - which is in principle the wrong way to indicate
language, though not very wrong - affects JAWS, or HPR, in the absence of
lang attributes. (FrontPage does recognize lang attributes too, and gives
them priority over the meta tag. But FP does not make it too easy to
authors to set lang attributes. In effect, the author needs to manipulate
them at the markup level directly, contrary to the overall wysiwyg style
of authoring that dominates in FP usage.)

Somewhat similar considerations apply to MS Word. When an author has
selected the language settings and has set the language of foreign words
as well, then, upon saving the document as HTML (a debatable move, though
it produces tolerable results when using the filter that removes a lot of
Office-specific code) the language information is reflected in lang
attributes in the generated HTML code.

But I wonder whether JAWS or other programs, when reading MS Word
documents, can utilize the language information in the Word format.

One more question: when reading XHTML documents, do they recognize
both lang and xml:lang attributes? (This xml:lang thing has caused some
confusion, and authors who wish to swear by the most recent
recommendations might wish to use both lang and xml:lang, which is boring
to them, or, being very "modern", to use xml:lang only, perhaps missing
the actual benefits of language markup since this attribute might not be
recognized.)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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From: Sean Keegan
Date: Thu, Apr 22 2004 11:05PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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As far as the two big screen-readers are concerned, Window-Eyes and JAWS
5.0 will support the lang attribute for those language packs installed
on the computer (installing the additional language packs occurs when
you are installing either Window-Eyes or JAWS).

About the only languages I have not tested this with is German,
Portuguese, and Finnish (Spanish, French, and Italian worked for me).

Take care,
Sean

Sean Keegan
Web Accessibility Instructor
High Tech Center Training Unit for the
California Community Colleges
408.996.6044

From: Sachin Pavithran
Date: Fri, Apr 23 2004 7:43AM
Subject: Re: alt text in 2 languages?
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I know that JAWS does work great with German. One of the JAWS users here at
Utah State University uses JAWS with his German classes that he is enrolled
in.

Sachin

******************************************************

Dev Pavithran
Training and Development Specialist
Center for Persons with Disabilities
6800 Old Main Hill,
Logan, Ut - 84322
U.S.A.

Work Phone : 1-(435)-797 0974

Email : = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

Visit Us at http://www.cpd.usu.edu

******************************************************

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Keegan" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 11:05 PM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?

> As far as the two big screen-readers are concerned, Window-Eyes and JAWS
> 5.0 will support the lang attribute for those language packs installed
> on the computer (installing the additional language packs occurs when
> you are installing either Window-Eyes or JAWS).
>
> About the only languages I have not tested this with is German,
> Portuguese, and Finnish (Spanish, French, and Italian worked for me).
>
> Take care,
> Sean
>
> Sean Keegan
> Web Accessibility Instructor
> High Tech Center Training Unit for the
> California Community Colleges
> 408.996.6044
>
>

From: julian.rickards
Date: Tue, Apr 27 2004 5:48AM
Subject: RE: alt text in 2 languages?
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