Accessibility in Linux systems

Posted Oct 9, 2008 9:33 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: Accessibility in Linux systems by i3839
Parent article: Accessibility in Linux systems

The point at which a string gets translated for internationalisation is often not the point where you'd want it read by text to speech software or sent to a brail terminal.

For a graphical application, it will usually translate most of its UI strings with gettext() on start up. You'd only want these read when the user tries to interact with those controls. The same probably goes for full screen text mode applications.

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Accessibility in Linux systems

Posted Oct 10, 2008 1:46 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (1 responses)

Gah, you're right for how it currently works. I've no experience with internationalisation and I expected something more elaborate than just one function gettext() which is called at startup for each string, for some reason.

Accessibility in Linux systems

Posted Oct 11, 2008 2:49 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's not, _() (aka gettext()) is called *when a translation is needed* for
each string (it translates each format string into a new one given the
current locale, possibly reordering arguments in the process). It's just
that GUI applications often need to translate most of their strings in one
big lump at initial-window-mapping time.