Re: [Groff] Semantic tagging and accessibility

[Eric S. Raymond]

Susan Jolly <address@hidden>:
> Here's just one small example where DocBook scale semantic tagging makes a
> difference to English braille in a way that might be unexpected to someone
> unfamiliar with braille rules.  Braille is to some extent a shorthand and
> uses each of the letters to represent a word when the letter stands alone.
> For example, the letter _p_ translates the word _people_ and the letter _x_
> translates (arbitrarily) the word _it_.  Braille translations thus have to
> insert a special braille escape character when a letter stands for itself
> rather than for the default word in order to avoid nonsense.  (Using the
> braille equivalent of italics or quotes would be ambiguous.)  In this case
> tagging the literal or symbolic use of letters with the equivalent of HTML
> <var> would avoid the need for heuristics in the braille transcribing
> software.

Thank you, thst was extremely educational.  It also hands me an
argument for DocBook-centered document flows which I shall probably
get serious use out of when dealing with people who cannot be made to
care about the technical-merit arguments I'd rather make.  "But think
of the blind people..."
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>