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Re: lang attribute for foreign words found in Merriam Webster's dictionary?

for

From: John Foliot
Date: Apr 22, 2015 9:04AM

All,

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with the idea that perpetuating the poor pronunciation of words - words that could be enunciated properly by simply using HTML the way it was designed to be used, and leveraging the ability of screen readers to switch language packs on the fly - no, I have to disagree that this is a good idea, let alone a best practice. I believe we can and should do better.

While I may not be a daily screen reader user, and my screen reader(s) are not personally fine-tuned or modified beyond default installation, none-the-less it is my experience that most screen readers ship by default with multiple language packs. Eloquence for JAWS Languages include: American English, British English, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Finnish; NVDA with eSpeak supports over 30 languages (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html), while VoiceOver ships with support for 24 languages (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201917) and so for those languages at least, using @lang markup will see the benefits of on-the-fly language switching. Further, even if the end user does not have a specific language pack installed, at least Jaws will deal with the issues proactively:
"If JAWS or MAGic only said, Russian, Greek, or Polish, instead of reading the text in those languages, this indicates that your speech synthesizer does not support those languages. Even so, JAWS and MAGic indicate the language being used."
- http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-Up/Languages.htm

My friend Chaals "... wouldn't mark up croissant, ennui, realpolitik or zeitgeist, but would mark up "joie de vivre"..." without further explanation as to his criteria for deciding which was or wasn't marked up (is it the difference between a word and a phrase? What about mañana? Is saying Man-ana - rhymes with banana - really the best user-experience we can deliver?), however personally, I see no harm, and some potential benefit in marking-up all foreign languages in my HTML documents as best as possible.

But not doing something, so-as to perpetuate a broken but familiar outcome, no, I can't accept that - sorry.

JF
​--
John Foliot
Principal Accessibility Consultant
Deque Systems Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>

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