Re: Footnotes -Reply

Jaysen--

Why is the issue of how notes are numbered a special access issue?

Using <P class = note> mumble </P>
or
more generally <DIV class = sidebar>foo bar and var </DIV>
and leaving it to the stylesheet to decide how that is rendered is the clean
way to do it, and there is nothing "accessibility specific" involved to
discuss as far as I can tell.

As a thumb rule, it's important to design accessibility solutions using the
framework and machinery that is invented to build and implement general
features --CSS is one such mechanism--
and the above has the greatest chance of success since it is likely to get
implemented for the general user anyway.

This said, then the only issue remains
"how do specific stylesheet instances deal with
creating effective presentations of the material"?

That is a question for the person designing the user agent --and not a
"decision by committee" item.

In this case, the "designer of the user agent"
will end up translating to  "the person designing the braille or audio
stylesheet".

So now you can factor the problem down to:

what mechanisms does the Braille stylesheet need to provide a presentation of
the note in Braille.

Since Braille is a two-dimensional random-access physical layout, I consider
it similar in many respects to the visual layout--
modulo the fact that things wrap differently in Braille as a consequence of
Braille taking up more physical space--
this said, there should be very few Braille-specific demands on the
style-sheet specification--
what is required is a good implementation of a well-designed Braille
stylesheet.

Said differently, the CSS spec will probably be minimally impacted;
however, attempting to take a visual stylesheet and mapping that one to one to
Braille will probably produce bad/unusable Braille.

So in summary, let's keep the technical work focused at where the work is
necessary, rather than discussing general mechanisms for creating notes
--those general mechanimss are worked on
from the point of view of the general user --a good thing from our
perspective.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      Adobe Systems                 Tel: 1 (408) 536 3945   (W14-129)
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Received on Thursday, 31 July 1997 19:23:57 UTC