Re: Best citation format for accessibility

Which also raises an interesting question, Bill.

Is there any reason that the epub:XXXX attributes are restricted to an EPUB?  Could they be used online or in other publication types?   And if so, would it be better to recast them as “dpub” or “pwd” in order to make them more general purpose?

Leonard

From: Bill McCoy
Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at 11:02 AM
To: Robin Berjon
Cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: Re: Best citation format for accessibility
Resent-From: <public-digipub-ig@w3.org<mailto:public-digipub-ig@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at 11:03 AM

The EDUPUB profile of EPUB 3 defines a number of semantic superstructures, many are adapted from the DocBook XML schema including "biblioentry". http://www.idpf.org/epub/profiles/edu/structure/ .

Whether the mapping of DocBook semantics to HTML5 via the EDUPUB profile is the "best" approach for citations is surely debatable but I believe it will support the semantic-based content reformatting you posit and as such will be good for a11y (which has been a primary concern in the EDUPUB initiative).

--Bill

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 7:41 AM, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com<mailto:robin@berjon.com>> wrote:
Hi,

citations in scholarly publishing have a long history of at-time
acrimonious disagreement over the exact format one should set them in.
There can be long arguments about the how and why of some specific
detail, but these are all about visual presentation. I have yet to hear
someone discuss the best format to use for the *content*, when in
digital form, such that it is most accessible.

By applying some technology, we can reformat a citation for visual
rendering. We can even make citation formatting follow readers'
preferences rather than publishers'. But when doing so the HTML-level
encoding of the citations should be optimised for semantic, non-visual
access.

So my question is: has anyone given thought to what the best order of
content and best markup practices would be for optimally accessible
citations?

Thanks!

--
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon




--

Bill McCoy
Executive Director
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)
email: bmccoy@idpf.org<mailto:bmccoy@idpf.org>
mobile: +1 206 353 0233