Add Indigenous Languages to Acrobat

[MegganDDP]

From an inclusion lens, there's a significant population of Indigenous peoples whose language is not represented in any Adobe products. More Indigenous languages should be added to Acrobats language capabilities to inform screen readers of how to properly output Indigenous words.

There are two problems with how Adobe is approaching its lack of inclusion of Indigenous languages.

1.  There should be more Indigenous languages added.
2.  The mono-language setting for a document is limiting and doesn't allow for the diversity of multiple languages to help communicate the message appropriately.

There are over 70 Indigenous languages in Canada. Adobe is a leader in the community for reviewing PDFs however right now screen readers are not supported by Adobe's language capabilities by including Indigenous languages. Screen readers are limited to only speaking in either English or French in a document rather than interpreting the information properly and outputting Indigenous pronunciations. From an accessibility perspective, it's mandatory to set the language of a PDF document so that screen readers can interpret the information properly however if your document is in a language that's not available in Adobe's language settings then it's impossible to truly make that document accessible. 

Mono-language is a limitation imposed by Adobe's software where we can only set one language for the entire document. This is limiting because often when working with information for Indigenous people there's a need to have both their Indigenous language represented and also a translation of that as well into most often English or French. Screen readers are not able to detect a language, then switch partway through the document, and Adobe's language settings are not robust enough to account for Indigenous languages since it's not equipped with them. The result is that the section with the Indigenous language gets read in the set language of the document which can lead to confusion on the user end since there's incorrect pronunciation and no indication that there's been a language change. 

There's definitely an option to do better and provide more flexibility here by offering more Indigenous languages available as well as creating a feature to add multilingual language settings within a document. 

[Amal.]

Hi Meggan

Hope you are doing well and sorry to hear that.

Please share your feedback with the engineering team using the link https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

Regards

Amal

[MegganDDP]

Thanks Amal. I'll put a feedback request there. 

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

@MegganDDP , I agree.

There's one item to clarify: When you say "mono-language, I assume you're referring to the metadata setting (File Properties) where the primary language of the document is set, correct?

You can set a different language on any other portion of the PDF file via either a <Tag>, or a <Span> tag on a portion of text. Set the tag's Properties to French or any other language in the drop-down menu.

 

So it is possible to have multiple languages in a PDF.  Time-consuming PITA to do this often in a PDF, but the capability is there.

Doing this in the source Word or Adobe InDesign file would be much faster: use character styles for each language needed and the particular language setting will be built into the PDF. 

@Amal.   Another shortcoming for Adobe to address: Making more languages available in the selection / drop-down boxes, such as:

• The Language drop-down menu in Acrobat shown above.
• The Language menu in a tag's Properties.
• The Language menu in InDesign's character settings. (I know Adobe can't adjust what's in Word's style settings.)

We need more languages, AND we also need to be able to more easily apply them to entire documents or selected portions.

I recognise that most Acrobat users don't need a full library of the entire world's languages at their fingertips. Maybe they can be made available by "Language Packs" that a user could select and download from Adobe's website and add them to their version of Acrobat and InDesign?  Possibly by region, such as:

• Canadian Aboriginal
• US Native American
• Australian Aboriginal
• European Extinct Dialects
• Southeast Asian Dialects
• etc.

Would love to see Adobe expand this feature. It's needed very much to accomodate the World's requirements for fully accessible PDFs.

 

[MegganDDP]

Amazing Bevi! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and totally agree with the importance of adding more language options. That would definitely help with approaching the work from an accessibility lens as even with the span language features without access to the appropriate language it would still not come off as intended.

I think this would be huge for the Indigenous community specifically because their languages haven't been as celebrated in the past as it should have been and as such now there is a loss of language. With the ability to indicate both English/French and Indigenous languages within a PDF, it would be helpful for regaining or recognizing that language.

[Rajiv5C2C]

I also work with Indigenous languages. For Syllabics, this would be amazing when recognizing text from scanned documents. Engineers would just have to apply the Unicode UCAS code block.

For Roman Orthography, I would be useful to have a universal OCR for multiple diacritics. For example, the Dene use acute, grave, and ogonek accents (and a combination of each) for all its vowels:

á à ą ą́ ą̀ 

Chipewyan uses a diareses on its e:

e ë é è ë́ ę ę́ ę̀ ę̈́

etc. 

The languages also use a stroked l (Ł ł) a glottal stop (Ɂ ɂ) and sometimes a turned e (Ǝ ǝ).

The ability to recognize these is already available in different languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Lithuanian that Adobe supports. There should be a way to bring all these glyph forms together, including for double or even triple stacked diacritics.