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Thread: Bi-lingual alt-text
Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)
From: Marc Tierney
Date: Thu, Jun 30 2005 8:12AM
Subject: Bi-lingual alt-text
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HI Just a query.
I'm involved in producing a bi-lingual website for a community group, in
English and Welsh.
When it comes to the Welsh part of the site, in which language should I
put write the alt text for pictures.
Obviously to keep it PC I should put them in Welsh in line with the rest
of the language on that page, however what is the point if a screen
reader can only work in English?
Has anyone got any experience of producing bi lingual websites with alt
tags.
Let me know!
Marc
ICT Development Support Officer
Pembrokeshire Association of Voluntary Services
From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Thu, Jun 30 2005 8:22AM
Subject: Re: Bi-lingual alt-text
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> HI Just a query.
>
> I'm involved in producing a bi-lingual website for a community group, in
> English and Welsh.
> When it comes to the Welsh part of the site, in which language should I
> put write the alt text for pictures.
What is the language of the rest of the page? Alternative text is like
normal text, using an other language will just confuse people.
> Obviously to keep it PC I should put them in Welsh in line with the rest
> of the language on that page, however what is the point if a screen
> reader can only work in English?
Who claimed that it only works in English? You can set your screen
reader to different languages, I don't know if there is a Welsh/Gaelic
language pack, but my guess is that a Welsh user will have it if it
there is one. How would a screen reader read the rest of the page?
Alternative text is no magic hidden trick, it is part of the rendered
content just like the other content is.
> Has anyone got any experience of producing bi lingual websites with alt
> tags.
On all our international sites we kept the alternative text (there is
no alt tag, please, for the love of all that is lovable everybody stop
talking about alt tags) in the language of the main document - it is
part of the CMS entry form - and didn't run into any problem so far.
--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/
From: ben morrison
Date: Thu, Jun 30 2005 8:31AM
Subject: Re: Bi-lingual alt-text
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> Obviously to keep it PC I should put them in Welsh in line with the rest
> of the language on that page, however what is the point if a screen
> reader can only work in English?
If the rest of the page is in welsh how will the screen reader will
cope with that?
ben
From: John Foliot - WATS.ca
Date: Thu, Jun 30 2005 8:34AM
Subject: RE: Bi-lingual alt-text
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Marc Tierney wrote:
> HI Just a query.
>
> I'm involved in producing a bi-lingual website for a
> community group, in
> English and Welsh.
>
> When it comes to the Welsh part of the site, in which
> language should I
> put write the alt text for pictures.
>
> Obviously to keep it PC I should put them in Welsh in line
> with the rest
> of the language on that page, however what is the point if a screen
> reader can only work in English?
>
> Has anyone got any experience of producing bi lingual
> websites with alt
> tags.
>
> Let me know!
>
> Marc
Marc,
Bilingualism is a real issue here in Canada, and so I suspect I can help.
Within the federal government, they are mandated (legislated!) to provide
all content in the language of "source"... In other words the alt text must
be in French if the page content is in French. This also extends to
MetaData as well (keywords, description, etc.), and any other language
sensitive content. So I would suggest that you provide the alt text in
Welsh for the pages authored in Welsh.
Remember, ALT text is there for more than just screen readers. Text only
browsers, hand helds, etc. do not support images, and so the ALT text in
those instances is important to the end user. Some users may also
deliberately disable images in their browsers due to slow connection speeds,
etc.
I will also suggest that none of your visually impaired users will be
accessing the Welsh content anyway, as I am unaware of any screen reader
that supports the Welsh language - thus they will be accessing the English
version (no?). Most Western screen readers support about 7 - 10 languages
(JAWS 6.0 currently supports US English, UK English, French, Canadian
French, Castilian Spanish, Latin America Spanish, German, Italian, Finnish,
Brazilian Portuguese).
[O.T. - if anyone is aware of screen reading software that supports other
languages, such as Welsh, could you kindly share that info?]
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
JF
From: Marc Tierney
Date: Fri, Jul 01 2005 5:09AM
Subject: RE: Bi-lingual alt-text
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Hi John
Thanks very much for that info... I'll keep doing a bit of research into
the topic and feed back... working and living in Wales I'm not aware
that there are screenreaders with that functionality.... we've only just
got a very limited version of Windows produced in Welsh.. and some would
say its not perfect.
Marc
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sat, Jul 02 2005 12:03PM
Subject: RE: Bi-lingual alt-text
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On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:
> Bilingualism is a real issue here in Canada, and so I suspect I can help.
>
> Within the federal government, they are mandated (legislated!) to provide
> all content in the language of "source"... In other words the alt text must
> be in French if the page content is in French.
Sounds like a simple and useful guideline. I hope web authors apply it
with pleasure, enjoying the fact that it explicitly tells them to avoid
worse than useless work that they might otherwise do, in trying to write
bilingual alternative texts.
The idea of bilingual alternative texts might, however, reflect a deeper
problem: bilingual pages. As a rule, bilingual pages are very hostile to
accessibility, since they mess things up by mixing understandable content
with something that might be quite obscure, and even emotionally
alienating. _Sites_ should be bilingual or multilingual in many occasions,
of course, and availability of content in two or more languages might be a
legal requirement, or at least essential to accessibility.
In rare cases, a bilingual page may make sense. For example, a photo
gallery (a page containing just photos, captions, and very short
additional texts) might conceivably be bilingual in a bilingual country.
Then the alt texts need to be either language-neutral or bilingual.
The syntax of HTML does not allow the indication of language change inside
the alternate text (since an attribute value is plain text). This is one
reason why it would be better to make even an image gallery available
in two versions, instead of a bilingual page.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/