Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text] text-transform's design, intent and reality resolution (#3775)

My understanding is that the question here was in essence:

"Can we agree that it is a fundamental part of the design of text-transform that it must in all cases be reflected everywhere including in the screen-reader rendering, and therefore that we can base decisions about future values on that fact?"

I believe the answer is no.

It is true that there are values of text-transform that affect the rendering in screen readers, and that's intentional on their part. For example changes of case.

However:
* There are also values of text-transform that do not affect the rendering in screen readers, and that distinction is critical to their purpose. For example full-width or full-size-kana.

* In all of these cases, screen readers should also be allowed, if they so desire, to present the alternate view to their users (maybe on demand, maybe based on a setting… this is a UX problem, and is out of scope for the spec).

* There are cases where CSS doesn't load, so counting on it to change semantics is unreliable anyway.

The design principle, to me, is that text-transform does not alter the meaning of the styled text. User agents such as screen readers that provide a non-visual rendering may take that styling into account when deciding how to present the text, but it is not a thing that should be relied on as a design principle of this feature. (Whether users of a particular implementation can rely on that implementation doing is separate, and not particularly relevant here.)

The way to apply that principle to the proposed math related text-tranform would be:
- adding these transforms is OK.
- using these transforms to explain how various pieces of mathML markup (such as the mathvariant attribute) cause endering changes is OK.
- relying on these transforms to alter the meaning of the document, and to semantically distinguish between 'a' and '<span style=text-tranform:math-fraktur>a</span> is not robust.
- Markup is what needs to alter the semantics. The [spec of mathvariant attribute](https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter3.html#presm.mstyle) is already fairly clear about that, but it could be further clarified that it is expected to affect all renderings, including the accessibility tree and other non visual renderings.

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Received on Thursday, 2 July 2020 01:55:00 UTC