I would ask what is the nature of the site. If it is more casual youu could make the alt like “the Round Church in downtown Bowmore.”
If gd isn’t defined in the page or the screen reader itself isn’t set to Gaelic/Scot/(maybe even EnglishUK) the screen reader will either botch it or spell it. My vote is for botch. Unless the visitor is unaware that the site is Gaelic based, they shouldn’t be worried about their screen reader is messing up. Maybe put a language disclaimer up?
Looking around, I cannot find a screen reader that supports Gaelic.
It’s the “The Round Church in Bowmore (a circular-shaped church)” the rest are essentially supplementary snippets of information as to why it was designed in that shape not how it appears in the absence of the image.
What beats me is why anybody thought the devil might want to hide in the corners. I’d have thought he’d prefer the distillery at the bottom of the hill.
I had an older copy of JAWS which, as a demo, did not support a full range of languages. It did support Finnish, Spanish, and two or three versions of English, among others, but no Dutch.
So on pages who correctly used the lang attribute on the HTML tag itself, my readers (JAWS 7 and 10, also NVDA) would announce “Dutch” in English before proceding to attempt to pronounce the Dutch as English words. However if there were a span somewhere with lang=“fi” it would use Finnish pronunciation in there because it did have Finnish as a built-in (I can’t find languages anymore in my current version, maybe they removed it?).
Unfortunately with JAWS, if you want Dutch voices you have to go get them separately unless you buy your copy from the Belgium office (where they’ll give you 2 Dutch voices and a Belgian one). NVDA came so far as I remember with a boatload of langauges, but that’s open source for you (they also sounded gross, also open source for you
With VoiceOver, it doesn’t matter where you buy your Mac, even if it’s already sitting in the iShop with Dutch langauge set as the OS languages, you have English voices only. You want Dutch voices, you have to go get them yourself from somewhere. There are language packs available. But so imagine you use a screen reader and you just bought a Mac, partially because your friends have told you it’ll speak out of the box (so also during setup, login, etc). But it speaks a language you once learned in high school and haven’t touched since except the occasional watching of an imported television show (which has subtitles anyways). Lawlz. I hope they change that some day.
My pages all have the lang attribute set to English, which is always the main language. Gaelic appears mainly as place or business names, with the odd quotation. So if I’ve understood correctly, a span marked as gd should be announced in English/Dutch/Russian or whatever the reader is using as “Scots Gaelic”, and because it’s most unlikely to have that language installed, it will then attempt to pronounce it as English/Dutch/Russian or whatever - yes? I think I can live with that, on the basis that’s pretty much what every sighted visitor to the site is going to do.
In alt text, where it’s likely to just be the odd word in Gaelic, it will attempt to pronounce it as English, in accordance with the lang attribute on the HTML. Hopefully, the user will guess it’s a Gaelic word/name from the context. In one particular instance, I needed the whole of the alt text in Gaelic (because it was a picture of a Gaelic inscription), so I added the lang attribute to the img. Somewhat to my surprise, the Validator didn’t have a conniption, but was that the best way to do it? There was an associated English translation of the inscription, so that wasn’t an issue.
So if I’ve understood correctly, a span marked as gd should be announced in English/Dutch/Russian or whatever the reader is using as “Scots Gaelic”, and because it’s most unlikely to have that language installed, it will then attempt to pronounce it as English/Dutch/Russian or whatever - yes?
Yes.
And I don’t see how it could be wrong to add a lang attribute to an img tag. It says in the specs that it’s a possibly attribute of the img element: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#h-13.2 (under "Attributes defined elsewhere).
That’s my Vulcan side again :); to me, an image doesn’t have a language, so an <img> tag shouldn’t have a lang attribute. (Although clearly there’s a flaw in that logic, since I just described an image that does have a language…) Perhaps I should read the specs more.
[ot]
Me? No. Bears are more into hugging than violence. But nice to know somebody realises there’s a difference. :)[/ot]
The ALT has a language so do some images in affect; if it displays important text a STOP sign or button for example or ‘Caution: Poes will eat all unguarded chocolate’ symbols, etc.
Surely not. Pixar made some of my favourite films. Surely they wouldn’t stoop so low. But then, it just goes to prove what I’ve always said: humans cause the violence and bears get all the bad press.[/ot]