RE: RE: update on Hebrew and Arabic

please take a look at my summary at
http://ubaccess.com/hebrew-access.html

It goes through the issue from beginning to end, but reaches a different
conclusion.
As I did not find a tool usable by people with no vision that addresses this
problem, and as
tools that are for low vision require dexterity and are extremely expensive.
I thought that the burden of vowels was still at the author end

All the best,

Lisa Seeman

UnBounded Access

Widen the World Web

http://www.UBaccess.com



-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On
Behalf Of Martin Duerst
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 10:15 PM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Fwd: RE: update on hebrew and arabic



Dear WAI and I18N groups,

I'm forwarding this from some internal discussion:

>From: Martin Duerst <[email protected]>

>Lisa Seeman has come up with some very good leads, in particular
>http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~erelsgl/bxi/hmntx/teud_tokna.html#English,
>where the software seems to be open source.
>
>Rates such as 95% sound quite good; that may be about the rate
>at which the results are 'bearable' (unfortunately,
>many people in the accessibility area are used to 'bear' one
>or the other problem). Ordinary Hebrew text sometimes uses vowel
>points for disambiguation; it would be interesting to know
>whether these cases correspond in any way to the cases where
>the programs have difficulties.
>
>Another interesting thing to investigate would be to
>see what Hebrew/Arabic Braille do. If they use some
>equivalents of diacritic vowels, then this means that
>we have the same problem with braille transcription.
>If they don't, then this means that many blind people
>may be used to figure out the vowels themselves, which
>may mean that lower correctness rates, or even just
>reading with dummy vowels (like classic Egyptian texts :-)
>could work.
>
>Please note that English also has ambiguities (read/read),
>and similar for many other languages. How would English be
>handled in the present guidelines?
>
>As for Arabic having many more possibilities and therefore
>being more difficult, I think there is a misunderstanding.
>The number of diacritic vowels is much smaller in Arabic
>(3) than in Hebrew (about 10). There are other ways to
>create more different word forms (pre/suffixes, long
>vowels that are written like consonants), and that may
>have been counted. I think the problem for Arabic should
>be similar in complexity, or even easier.
>
>Earlier, we have considered the following solutions:
>
>1) Pushing fully vocalized texts.
>2) Asking the Unicode consortium for a second series
>    of 'hidden' vowel signs, not displayed usually.
>3) Pushing annotations (<ruby>, something like alt,...)
>4) Using technology, and hoping that it is advanced
>    enough and will advance further.
>
>Given Lisa's findings, and the problems we would have
>with getting any of 1) to 3) accepted in practice,
>things seem to point to 4). If the new guidelines
>can be written in a way that encourages both research
>and business to follow that direction, that would
>probably be best.
>
>Regards,    Martin.