Re: presentations

[Jason White <jasonw ariel ucs unimelb edu au>]

Guylhem Aznar writes:

 > Signwriting only needs 466 base symbols divided in 12 categories (that's not a
 > lot) but they must be combined spatially.
 > This spatial combination should require either a keybord or widgets to select
 > the category then to place the symbol on the canvas.

Has anyone done work to optimize the keyboard entry of this kind of
system? Also, it would be interesting to know whether there is a
linear representation that can be transformed into the spatial format;
for speech output I suppose one could use voice parameters or vary the
two channels of a stereo signal to represent the spatial dimensions.
for braille output the representation would probably have to be fully
linearized.

I am just thinking in terms of the cross-modality accessibility of
this sort of script. Of course, for languages with large character
sets there are standard keyboard-based input methods, and at least
there is good prospect of a Unicode representation of the text, or,
failing that, a character set that can be converted to Unicode.