Re: Click here

At 01:12 AM 2002-08-10, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

>More to the point, it is difficult to imagine what context would be chosen.

In a list other than DL you take the list item.  [DL: take DT, DD pair]

Inside a paragraph you take a sentence.  That's lightweight NLP.

>Without some heavywieght natural language processing it is difficult to do
>more than make a guess at how much of the surrounding stuff should be
>included.

Even with the most heavyweight NLP, without author collaboration and markup
conventions you are guessing.  More weight, better guess.  But guessing
*could be effective*.  If one reduces to 5% the fraction of links where the
user has to retreat to "read full text" mode in the screen reader, you have
broken the back of the problem.

>Authoring hypertext seems to me a skill that involves working out what link
>text should be.

That's what it takes to connect with the accessible UI technology
in the field today.

We can't take an idealistic posture and simply plead "broken browsers" where
there is a clear consensus pattern of practice across [screen readers and
close kin] on this point.

Taking a fresh look from first principles, marking the appropriate
context might be something that takes less skill, and bends the author's
intent less out of shape.  Hence achieves a higher fraction of web content
actually deployed that conforms -- eventually.

Since the latter could be readily semi-automated, something like
spell-correct on-the-fly, this option could reasonably be considered as a
candidate for the functional flow of the future.  And XHTML 2.0 does need to
have one eye on the future.  See also

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2000JulSep/0014.html
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-tech-comments/2000Oct/0006.html

Just my onepence.

Al


>just my tuppence.
>
>chaals
>
>On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, David Woolley wrote:
>
> >
> >> If a screenreader is going to generate a summary, it should -- at the
> >> very least -- include a good degree of context around the link, not
> >
> >Neither Internet Explorer nor Lynx generate any context when tabulating
> >the links in a document.
> >
>
>--
>Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 
>134 136
>W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 
>38 78 22
>Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
>(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, 
>France)

Received on Saturday, 10 August 2002 10:07:39 UTC