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Combining-accents in French

For many European languages, we feel it might be most natural to write using the 26 latin characters (a-z), plus accents that are added afterwards. [This is how Unicode's designers encourage us to represent accents also.] Using this new alphabet, and setting the Dasher edit-box font to ClearlyU, I got this idea working nicely. In this first prototype, the new accent group is contained in an orange box, and the accents themselves appear in yellow boxes. All the accents (acute, circumflex, cedilla, grave) were written in this way in the screenshot shown.
images/FrenchCombining
This approach makes European languages much more alike in Dasher. We can use a single alphabet file and train it in any language, as long as the training text is appropriately decomposed.
The Dasher project is supported by the Gatsby Foundation
and by the European Commission in the context of the AEGIS project - open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards)
David MacKay
Site last modified Fri Oct 1 10:33:24 BST 2010