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you seem to be confusing "any" with "all". it would be nice to have more accesible interfaces for everyone. helping one person doesn't mean you fail to help ev

you seem to be confusing "any" with "all". it would be nice to have more accesible interfaces for everyone. helping one person doesn't mean you fail to help everyone, in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. we're asking for some access. not all the access. scoped properly, it doesn't seem to be that insurmountable of a development goal, honestly.

jrochkind1 6y ago
> in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. How does facilitating multilingual screen-reading help someone who is neither multilingual nor uses a screen-reader? How can it possibly help everyone? (like literally 100% of people, you are suggesting?) What am I missing?
- danShumway 6y ago
  - better client displays (allowing a user client to switch out fonts based on the language, for example) - better support for users who are not multi-lingual (a client could try to auto-translate sections that are not in the user's native language) - better search capabilities (find me all documents that contain a French passage) - better voice-assistant support (if a document is being read out loud for any reason, it would be nice to be able to handle multiple languages well. This also combines with the auto-translate capabilities above.) Basically, all of the reasons why Gemini includes a "lang" attribute in the first place, except recognizing that parsers and clients want to be able to make use of that on a section-by-section basis rather than purely at the document level. Sometimes documents are big and expand across multiple languages. It's just a bad abstraction in general to assume that each document would only have one language type[0]. Documents/books in the real world don't work that way, and a document format that can't accurately represent a giant portion of classic literature isn't a very good general-purpose format. [0]: yes, technically Gemini allows you to specify multiple top-level languages, but that's not useful for anything. If I'm parsing a document, I don't want it to tell me "hey, there's some French in here somewhere, good luck!" Tell me where it is.

jrochkind1 6y ago

> in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. How does facilitating multilingual screen-reading help someone who is neither multilingual nor uses a screen-reader? How can it possibly help everyone? (like literally 100% of people, you are suggesting?) What am I missing?

danShumway 6y ago
- better client displays (allowing a user client to switch out fonts based on the language, for example) - better support for users who are not multi-lingual (a client could try to auto-translate sections that are not in the user's native language) - better search capabilities (find me all documents that contain a French passage) - better voice-assistant support (if a document is being read out loud for any reason, it would be nice to be able to handle multiple languages well. This also combines with the auto-translate capabilities above.) Basically, all of the reasons why Gemini includes a "lang" attribute in the first place, except recognizing that parsers and clients want to be able to make use of that on a section-by-section basis rather than purely at the document level. Sometimes documents are big and expand across multiple languages. It's just a bad abstraction in general to assume that each document would only have one language type[0]. Documents/books in the real world don't work that way, and a document format that can't accurately represent a giant portion of classic literature isn't a very good general-purpose format. [0]: yes, technically Gemini allows you to specify multiple top-level languages, but that's not useful for anything. If I'm parsing a document, I don't want it to tell me "hey, there's some French in here somewhere, good luck!" Tell me where it is.