The goal of this wiki is to capture design and development issues surrounding A2J-Author v5.
Q1: HOW ARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES HANDLED?
A1: When an author creates an A2J5 interview, they can set the "language" of the interview under the INTERVIEW tab. Whatever language they choose will determine what language is used in the A2J Viewer when the interview is run. Obviously, this only affects the language elements in the viewer program - buttons, labels, etc. The language of the interview itself has to be entered by the author in the desired language.
This is different from A24 where we had different viewer programs for each language. We had to do it that way in A2J4 because of Flash's requirement that font families be loaded for different languaguages and that could make the program very large and slow to load. Because A2J5 is browser-based, we can use the browser's ability to switch languages and fonts and not have to load them outselves.
Q2: Any changes in how the HotDocs answer set is created from answers to questions in the guided interview?
A2: No. The answer file will look exactly like it does in A2J4.
Q3: Will there still be a debugging panel through which developers can inspect what's going on in a session?
A3: Yes, and it will have more extensive capabilities.
Q4: Does this open an opportunity to support an easier 'interim save,' like we presently have with HotDocs interviews? (versus exit-save-return to questions)
A4: Yes, but the issues are complicated and not all technical. We can save inside a cookie using HTML5 local storage capability and this would be a great feature for interviews being run on mobile devices as we expect that people will start, stop and start these interviews more than they would on the desktop. We have to consider security and privacy in these situations though.
We can include the capability to "save as you go" or give the user the opportunity to "save now". The former is more convenient, the latter gives the user more control. Most people would opt for convenience, but we should carefully consider the highly private nature of the data we are dealing with.
Q5: How does gender and flesh color work for the guide and the user avatar?
A5: Here are the A2J4 guides and avatars.
Here are the A2J5 Avatars...
***QUESTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION***
Q: HOW DOES LHI KNOW WHICH A2J VIEWER TO LOAD (A2J4 OR A2J5)?
A: Suggested ...
- force a '5' into the name of hte file before upload
- load assuming a2j5 and then call a2j4 SWF if it fails on load (might be fastest)
- require that authors click a box or do a pulldown on LHI at upload time (requires LHI work)
***QUESTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION***
Q: HOW CAN WE MAKE A2J5 MORE ACCESSIBLE IN MORE LANGUAGES?
A: The interface elements, user messages and such are collected into a single file that can be found here called Lang-en.txt. The "en" is the ISO language code (link here), so this is the English lannguage file. I will post the other language files soon, but we are seeking volunteers who speak and write other languages to download this file and make a first pass at translating the interface elements, buttons, user messages, etc. and sending them to John Mayer (jmayer@cali.org) so we can get them reviewed by a second language speaker and start testing them in A2J.
Other Language Possibilities?
Russian
Polish
Hindi
Urdu
Farsi
French
Canadian French
Portaguese
Thai
Hmong
***QUESTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION***
Q: How best should A2J5 authors test their templates with HotDocs?
A: (I gather there will be something similar to 4, in which one would save answers from Preview, and then open them in the intended template in desktop HotDocs, simulating the eventual unification on LHI or other server environment.)