Tips
for accessibility
3.
Identify clearly changes in languages used and make contents simple
and easy to understand
Screen reading software with voice synthesizer is one of the assistive
tools used by visually impaired users. Some voice synthesizers can
'speak' in multiple languages but changes in languages should be
identified for the synthesizers to switch between languages. Some
Chinese synthesizer can handle English also but for most English
synthesizer, the reverse is not true. Thus, if the assistive tool
encounters Chinese characters, the internal coding being unknown
to it, meaningless sounds may be generated or the characters may
be interpreted as some control characters which may even cause a
system upset. In Hong Kong, it is quite common to have bilingual
pages (English and Chinese) in a web site and effective set up of
the pages helps the user to read the contents easily.
As
Internet allows people around the world to access your site, there
may be visitors whose first language is different from yours. Writing
in simple style, use of simple sentences and language make your
pages easier to understand. Slang and uncommon abbreviations (without
explanation) should be avoided.
Suggestions
-
-
Put Chinese and English contents on separate pages so that an
assistive tool needs to deal with only one language at a time.
Most government web sites are already in this format.
- If
the entry page is coded in Chinese, the language switching link
can be put as the first link at the top of the entry page so that
foreign users can switch to the English version immediately upon
entry to the site without the need to read the Chinese codes that
are in the rest of the page. The HKSAR Government portal - GovHK is of this format.
- The
W3C guidelines
also suggest the use of 'lang' parameter which can be used to
mark language changes within a sentence / paragraph. It helps
some of the assistive tools to render the text in those languages
if the assistive tool is equipped with multi-language capabilities.
- The
use of the 'charset' parameter in the <META> tag facilitates
the browser to identify the encoding of the contents. This provides
convenience to visitor when Chinese web pages are viewed.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=big5">
- for traditional Chinese encoding
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=gb2312">
- for simplified Chinese encoding
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