3 ms·

The problem is btw. not specific to Han unification/asian languages. It's that for every western language if you use screen readers.

the_other 5y ago
My thought whilst reading the article was that the Han unification would actually help screen readers. IIUC The meaning of the glyph is the same across all the languages, so the screen reader will get the correct meaning and can present it according to local settings. The problem with the European languages is that the different characters (letter variations, accent variations) can change the meaning of the word they're part of. Or have I misunderstood?
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  The same Han character can have wildly different pronunciations even in a single language (being a logogram, they represent a word and not a sound). KS X 1001, the primary Korean character set, even duplicated same characters according to their readings so that they can be almost [1] correctly converted back to Hangul. In practice they didn't work well though, and Unicode assigns all but one duplicate characters into the compatibility region. [1] These readings didn't take account for systematic variations like the initial sound law (두음법칙, for example 이 vs. 리 at the beginning of words).
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  You can't split CJK sentences into individual letters, inspect them one by one and decipher its exact meaning. If you present Chinese writing to a Japanese speaker, they'd only see complete gibberish consisting of letters they may or may not recognize. It also works the other way around too. On top of that, Kanjis aren't the only type of letters Japanese folks use. They also use Hiraganas and Katakanas, which are phonetic symbols and totally unrecognizable to non-Japanese speakers.
Snild 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that screen readers don't know which language to interpret text as?
- dathinab 5y ago
  If you don't tell them, yes. As many websites do not convey the language properly they try to fix that using some heuristics, but especially for small texts (like messages) that can easily fail hard leading to completely wrong pronunciation. Mail for example tried to fix that by allowing you to annotate the language for UTF-8 embedded in mail headers and the content. Ironically while that mechanism works for display names it doesn't work for email addresses itself. And I'm not sure any mail program uses it.

the_other 5y ago

My thought whilst reading the article was that the Han unification would actually help screen readers. IIUC The meaning of the glyph is the same across all the languages, so the screen reader will get the correct meaning and can present it according to local settings. The problem with the European languages is that the different characters (letter variations, accent variations) can change the meaning of the word they're part of. Or have I misunderstood?

lifthrasiir 5y ago
The same Han character can have wildly different pronunciations even in a single language (being a logogram, they represent a word and not a sound). KS X 1001, the primary Korean character set, even duplicated same characters according to their readings so that they can be almost [1] correctly converted back to Hangul. In practice they didn't work well though, and Unicode assigns all but one duplicate characters into the compatibility region. [1] These readings didn't take account for systematic variations like the initial sound law (두음법칙, for example 이 vs. 리 at the beginning of words).
soraminazuki 5y ago
You can't split CJK sentences into individual letters, inspect them one by one and decipher its exact meaning. If you present Chinese writing to a Japanese speaker, they'd only see complete gibberish consisting of letters they may or may not recognize. It also works the other way around too. On top of that, Kanjis aren't the only type of letters Japanese folks use. They also use Hiraganas and Katakanas, which are phonetic symbols and totally unrecognizable to non-Japanese speakers.

Snild 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that screen readers don't know which language to interpret text as?

dathinab 5y ago
If you don't tell them, yes. As many websites do not convey the language properly they try to fix that using some heuristics, but especially for small texts (like messages) that can easily fail hard leading to completely wrong pronunciation. Mail for example tried to fix that by allowing you to annotate the language for UTF-8 embedded in mail headers and the content. Ironically while that mechanism works for display names it doesn't work for email addresses itself. And I'm not sure any mail program uses it.