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Re:gemini:// space by Mediterraneo10 on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:16AM (#25986645)
Heuristics might work for longer text where the sample is large enough to uniquely identify the language, but for single words there is not enough information. If I write "coin" in my text, for example, am I using an English word, French word, or Irish word? The pronunciation varies drastically, and screenreaders have to know what to say.
Re:gemini:// space by microtherion on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:37AM (#25986755)
My go to anecdote on this is when I returned to Switzerland after several years in the US and walked by a bakery displaying a sign advertising a "Pain Surprise".

If anybody ever opens an S&M themed bakery, the problem will be accentuated.

Re:gemini:// space by eternalban on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:47AM (#25987188)
Not strictly S&M :) but fresh out of the oven Sangak bread of Iran can offer a "pain surprise" followed by culinary pleasure! Picking those hot pebbles off the back of the flatbread on the way home in the morning is a cherished memory of my childhood in Iran.
Re:gemini:// space by StavrosK on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:46AM (#25987181)
Oh that bakery has a gimmick where they throw a loaf of bread at your face when you enter.
Re:gemini:// space by knorker on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:42AM (#25987490)
Spoiler! :-(

Now it won't be a surprise.

Re:gemini:// space by StavrosK on Monday February 01, 2021 @06:48AM (#25987832)
At least the pain remains.
Re:gemini:// space by nkoren on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:52AM (#25987222)
Forwarding this to a friend of mine who owns a BDSM-themed coffeeshop...
Re:gemini:// space by amadsen on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:41AM (#25986778)
My vision is good and I also don't know if the word you quoted was supposed to be in English, French of Irish? The point being, a screen reader has no more or less information than a human reader.

It might be better then to invest effort in improving language inference heuristics, which would help in all applications (pdf documents, text files) than to try to build in support in each underlying protocol.

Re:gemini:// space by progval on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:42AM (#25987165)
But the screen reader needs to say the word, and the pronounciation of "coin" isn't the same in every language. I don't know about Irish, but it's radically different between French and English, the only sound in common is the "k".

This means that if the screenreader picks the wrong language, then the user has to guess the spelling from the way it's pronounced to understand the text.

Though I'll concede that right now on the web it isn't much better; but that's a failing of publishing tools, not the format.

Re:gemini:// space by Snarwin on Monday February 01, 2021 @06:42AM (#25987797)
Seems like the simplest fix is to allow the user to ask the screen reader how a word is spelled.
Re:gemini:// space by GoblinSlayer on Monday February 01, 2021 @11:28AM (#25990088)
Not unthinkable that's how a human will read foreign language too.
Re:gemini:// space by alpaca128 on Monday February 01, 2021 @09:30AM (#25988961)
> a screen reader has no more or less information than a human reader.

Indeed, so why not let the human writer clarify it?

Why do you prefer a resource intensive guessing algorithm that will never have a 100% accuracy over just having an annotation that takes less than 10 bytes and is trivial to parse?

In my opinion there's no reason to even consider the first option, especially with gemini's focus on simplicity in mind. This "what can another little JS library hurt" attitude is what lead to gemini in the first place.

Add language inference heuristics to cover all kinds of formats and now you've got a dependency. Then some people need different settings so you add config files and parsers/dependencies for those. At some point you update the model and now it can't properly differentiate Mandarin, Cantonese and short Japanese phrases anymore. You start adding cross-platform support and other features, and now some people say it's too slow on their Raspberry Pi Zero setup. Bloggers complain as they have to rearrange some quotes via trial-and-error so the heuristics pick up the correct language. Unfortunately that makes it worse for people running the older version 0.7.

After this rant it should be obvious, but: I prefer just adding a ["en"] or similar and stop worrying about it.

Re:gemini:// space by Mediterraneo10 on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:46AM (#25986805)
PDF actually has support for language tagging, and using it is a recommended part of any guide to accessibility for the visually impaired.

It may be that the language which a quoted foreign-language word is meant to read in was mentioned far back in the text. Human sighted readers will know how to read it, but computers won't yet (and perhaps won't for many years if not decades). However, there are visually impaired people now who need to be guaranteed the same Gemini experience as sighted users.

Re:gemini:// space by _wolfie_ on Monday February 01, 2021 @08:53AM (#25988675)
But some unicode characters are supposed to be rendered differently based on the language of the text that contains them. So this (language tagging) is required even for getting the thing rendered correctly.
Re:gemini:// space by mlyle on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:30AM (#25986724)
Humans need to know what to read, though, too, right?

Obviously humans are a bit better at contextual clues, but.. the information has to be there for a human user to make the distinction.

Re:gemini:// space by contravariant on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:55AM (#25987238)
Well if 'readable by a human' would be enough for screen readers then we wouldn't have to worry about accessibility surely?
Re:gemini:// space by mlyle on Monday February 01, 2021 @02:35PM (#25992653)
Sure. But computers spotting foreign words in context similarly to how humans do is a lot more likely than getting most foreign words appropriately semantically tagged.
Re:gemini:// space by Mediterraneo10 on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:31AM (#25986730)
Sure. A quoted foreign word might (but not always) appear in some context where any reader will know how to read it. However, for the time being, computers won't, and a screenreader won't manage without adequate semantic tagging.
Re:gemini:// space by wwn_se on Monday February 01, 2021 @03:50AM (#25986833)
How would a user not using a screen reader know?
Re:gemini:// space by detaro on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:15AM (#25986993)
The difference is that the screen reader has to pick a pronounciation which could be wrong, a sighted user reading matches on the letters. Mentally matching from a wrongly-spoken word is harder.
Re:gemini:// space by fckthisguy on Monday February 01, 2021 @08:58AM (#25988704)
In multilingual text, a foreign word/phrase/snippet is often shown between << and >>.

Not always, but often enough that it's an informal standard.