RE: Best citation format for accessibility

Hi Robin,

Great to hear from you. 

There is a great lack of consensus on best practices for citation in general. Harvard vs AMA vs Vancouver, and that does not include the variety of HTML citations. They all include essentially the same information in a different sequence. 

I turn the question around to you. What is missing? Should citations be chunked elements that a user can tab through? If AT can pick up on existing ontologies we can do this now using resources like BIBO [1],  CITO [2], and others. (This might not be easy, but it's better than <span class="surname">)

One pain point I see is the Name Date method of citation, which refers the reader to the citation by use of the authors surname and year of publication. For example, a reference to Moby Dick would be (Melville, 1851). Multiple references to the same work would use the same reference. When digital, these references are usually links.  I think this method of linking violates WCAG unless one is really careful.

Should we loop in WAI?

[1] http://bibliontology.com/

[2] http://www.essepuntato.it/lode/http://purl.org/spar/cito 

Tzviya Siegman
Digital Book Standards & Capabilities Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@berjon.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:41 AM
To: public-digipub-ig@w3.org
Subject: Best citation format for accessibility

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

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2015 15:34:12 UTC