Home : Assignments : WAR4
Standard being reported: Section 6: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Subsection Four: Clarify natural language usage
The standard may be accessed here.
When foreign text is included on a web page, it can confuse speech synthesizers and Braille devices. However, if the change in language is explicitly declared, the site is more accessible to multilingual users and alternative means for viewing Web sites. The natural language of the majority of the site should be declared through markup or HTTP headers. Acronyms and abbreviations should also have longer versions to make it more clear what is being said. Natural language helps search engines to find key words and identify documents properly to someone searching for applicable information. Natural language markup helps the readability of Web sites for all people and ought to be implemented accordingly.
This standard can easily be implemented by including markup as to what language the page is mostly in. Abbreviations and acronyms can be dealt with using the ABBR and ACRONYM tags by giving a title to each abbreviation and acronym to make it easier for those who are being read the information to understand. All inclusions of languages other than that which is stated as the natural language should be labeled appropriately so that screen readers can read it correctly--a Latin word doesn't quite sound the same when given an English pronunciation. This is a fairly easy standard to implement--web designers just need to keep in mind that any sqitch to a different language should be labeled and that any use of smaller versions of words should be labeled as well with the full version to make it easier for everyone to understand.
Sorry...I just thought with the captain issue in question, I'd throw
in my name for consideration.
Pintel