On 27/12/2005, at 2:28 AM, Raphael Higino wrote:
I think it won't be a big deal. At least here in Brazil users tend to think computers interpret characters with and without accents the same way. Well, we know computers see such characters as completely different symbols, butthey don't, and that's what I think we should count on.Most likely users here would press Alt-A if they saw "_Álbum" instead ofpressing Alt-´-A, since they think Á and A are the same.Maybe just Portuguese speaking users will think this way, as long as accentsare mostly used just to indicate stress. Perhaps in other languages worldwide A and Á are completely different. Hope I have made mysel clear.
Yes, you have, Raphael, and I know what you mean. I've even relied on it, having to choose an accented vowel for a keyboard shortcut because I've run out of other options, and simply hoping that my users will understand the non-accented vowel should be input. <sigh>
With so many people just starting using computers, it would be good to have something intuitive. I'm not sure my users would associate non-accented vowels with accented ones, since we use accents, or tones in fact, to distinguish meaning. If we were using the word "Álbum", we would also have another word "Album" with quite a different meaning. So it's the _difference_ between the two vowels which has been strongly impressed on our users' minds, not their similarity, if that makes sense.
So "_[A]Álbum" might well work better for us, however messy it might look.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN