On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 21:10:19 -0500 "Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode" <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> On 1/28/19 3:58 PM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote: > > Interestingly, bringing this word breaker into line with TUS in the > > UK may well be in breach of the Equality Act 2010. > > > > Richard. > > OK, I've got to ask: how would that be? How would this impinge on > anyone's equality on the basis of "age, disability, gender > reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and > maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation"? > (quote from WP) The most relevant clauses are 9(1), 9(4), 19(2), 29(5) and 29(7). The change would restrict Thais' access to the provision of a service. The service provided is to allow one to use a persistent, correctable spell-checking system for one's native language. Firefox and LibreOffice provide this service. Of course, one may have to supply the spell-checking databases oneself. Withdrawing this service for some ethnic groups would be breach of the law. By persistent, I means that corrections to the spell-checking remain when the text is revisited. For English plain-text, the easy correction is to remove false positives by adding the word to 'personal dictionaries'. The difficult correction, not always possible, is to remove the word from the spell-checker's word list. For scriptio continua scripts, line_break=complex_context in UCD terms, there is the additional problem that word-breaking is not infrequently wrong, even for Thai in Thai script. (Recent loanwords into Thai can be a nightmare. So is Pali in Thai script, though Pali spell-checking has its own issues.) Line-breaking can be corrected with WJ and ZWSP. At present, word-breaking can currently be corrected by inserting these characters, and then spelling can be negotiated - the visible characters are non-negotiable. The changes in the text will persist in plain text. If WJ ceases to be treated as joining words, then the service of a persistent, *correctable* spell-checking system is lost. Now, one defence to the denial of the service would be that it would be unreasonably difficult to allow users to solve the problem of word-breaks in the wrong place. However, if one is already providing that service, that defence cannot be applied to subsequently denying the service. Richard.
