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RE: Bi-lingual alt-text

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 2, 2005 12:03PM

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/