[A12n-forum] Re: Audio (Re: Elements of a strategy for African language web content)

[Andrew Cunningham <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don Osborn wrote:
> > Although from a more practical point of view, there are a few suggestions:
> >
> > 1) there needs to be wider knowledge of unicode and web
> > internationalization techniques.
>
> Very true.  To this end I have been communicating with Patrick Andies and
> some others re strategies for that in Africa.  More soon as this discussion
> enlarges.
sounds promising

> > 2) tools, including keyboard layouts, fonts and text and html editors
> > suitable for African languages.
>
> Also necesary.  Much of this is the focus of A12n-collaboration
as i realise.

> > 3) web services need to be made available that are suitable for african
> > languages and easily localisable into African languages. This may
> > include scripts for emailing contents of html forms, web based email
> > services, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, etc. Localise electronic
> > community tools.
>
> Some of these you've been pioneering in, and we've also discussed with Steve
> Yost of QuickTopic.  Definitely essential parts of the equation.
I have a few proposal floating around at this end. If any of them get 
funded, I should be able to explore these types of services in much more 
detail. It would be interesting to develop a blog or wiki in one or more 
African languages.
> > and develop localised search engine interfaces and langauge specific web
> > directories. Resource location tools are important.
>
> Again good points.
again, I've got a few ideas and some proposals in the works. But I'm 
very interested in hearing other peoples comments. MOst african 
langauges are at the starting point, so there is little practical use 
for resource location tools.
The primary concern is content creation, but personally I feel it is a 
trap not to look at content infrastructure and concentrate on content alone.
resource location tools, such as web directories should be built up as 
the African languages on the web evolve.
Just my two cents worth.

> > With respect to content development:
> >
> > 1) character set conversion tools to convert documents in legacy
> > encodings into unicode. We're doing this with some older non-unicode
> > Nuer word documents. I've created some conversion tables that we use
> > with TECKit to convert between the encodings.
>
> I think a fair amount of this has been going on.  The only other effort I
> can think of offhand, though, is that of RIFAL which did some work in Niger
> and several other countries.  It might be helpful to compile a list of
> legacy to Unicode conversions by country.
>
> This however would bring us back to an extremely useful idea we've discussed
> before - country pages on languages, character requirments, locale issues,
> etc.  Add to that these fonts issues.  Very time-consuming I think.
or language specific pages possibly. Yes, time consuming, but useful to 
do. Assuming I can find some spare time soon, I've been thinking of 
redeveloping my support and langauges pages into a more useful 
resource/support site. I'll try to flesh out one or two languages and 
send you the url for comments.
Ultimately, I guess because of lack of resources and time, its something 
that would need to be established in a collaborative manner.
> > 2) OCR software development for OCR in African languages, allowing
> > printed documents to be scanned and converted to electronic documents.
>
> Yes.  It was a minor headache going through the scanned version of the
> "Practical Orthography of African Languages" (now on the Bisharat site) to
> insert all the extended characters that the software didn't know how to
> interpret.  It would be a bigger headache for longer texts.
>
> It starts to look like an agenda, as well it should.  I am planning on
> airing for discussion another agenda - the one that came out of the Bamako
> 2002 WSIS prepcon workshop on African languages and the internet. Perhaps
> out of this message and that consideration a broader set of agenda items
> could be generated.
out of interest which items have you picked up from Bamako. There was 
some good and interesting stuff there, but some of the items coming out 
of Bamako were problematic at best.
Andrew

--
Andrew Cunningham
e-Diversity
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