Re: Best citation format for accessibility

Bill - I agree with you here concerning a PERSON who is consuming this content.

What is missing is providing the necessary information for MACHINE consumption (and understanding) of the content.  It would seem to me (without having any understanding of this area) that I would want to be able to encode all of the JATS information directly in the format (HTML).  Certainly, that would seem like the best approach.  Alternatively, and I don’t know if this makes sense (though it sounds like it does), I’d like a link/URI to that JATS data.  Sort of a “aria-describedat” if you will.

Leonard





On 9/22/15, 12:23 PM, "Bill Kasdorf" <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com> wrote:

>Exactly, I meant to mention that. Ideally, the citation in the text is linked to the full citation at the end of the article, all within the document.
>
>I think the point is that in the scholarly literature (and here I am only talking about that), the act of _reading_ a citation is for two main purposes:
>
>--The main purpose is for other authors to see if they have been cited by this author. ;-)
>
>--The next purpose is to see if the cited resource is something they need to get, or get to.
>
>They don't actually need the detailed granular semantics of the citation to accomplish the latter. They see the link (the DOI-based link in the full citation) and click on it and get to where they're going.
>
>But your point is well taken. For AT, a user wants to be able to do those things, and it ain't easy. I still think there's potential in the fact that the citation does in fact have mostly sufficient markup. For a given citation, they will mainly want to know "who are the authors?", "what's the title of the article?", "where was it published?", "when was it published?", and then "where do I click to get to it?" (That's my personal opinion; others may have other opinions.) Since the semantics that designate those things are usually (almost always) in the JATS markup of the citation, I think there's potential to look at that and say "how do we take that and make sure it works for AT?" This might involve a bit of refinement to the proposed ARIA structural semantics for citations. But maybe what's there is sufficient, and it's a matter of making sure that the places where these citations live online--in hosting services like HighWire, Atypon, and PT, and in the sites of big publishers like Wiley, Springer, and Elsevier, at the present time; again, I realize that in the future we want more than that) are wired to connect the dots from the JATS markup they get to what is needed to make the citation accessible.
>
>I'm not saying I have a solution yet, I'm just suggesting what might be a productive path forward, and might address this accessibility need in the near term for 90+% of the scholarly citations that are out there.
>
>--Bill K
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken [mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com] 
>Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 12:06 PM
>To: Bill Kasdorf; Robin Berjon; public-digipub-ig@w3.org
>Subject: RE: Best citation format for accessibility
>
>The reference to the citation and the citation are rather linked.
>
>As you noted, Bill, JATS is robust, but how does that get to a user?
>
>As a sited (cited?) reader, I find citations to be mind-blowingly awful to navigate. Citations are often lists within footnotes. Imagine the number of AT hops required!
>
>Tzviya Siegman
>Digital Book Standards & Capabilities Lead Wiley
>201-748-6884
>tsiegman@wiley.com 
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bill Kasdorf [mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 12:00 PM
>To: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken; Robin Berjon; public-digipub-ig@w3.org
>Subject: RE: Best citation format for accessibility
>
>Just pointing out that Tzviya is talking (at least partly) about something different than I was talking about.
>
>She is talking, in the context of Name/Date etc. ("Melville, 1851"), about how the citation is expressed in text, typically referencing a full citation provided in a bibliography or reference list (typically in a section at the end of the paper, in backmatter). She's exactly right, as usual. There are lots of different ways of doing that in-text citation, and many of those don't give you much to work with. But they aren't typically designed to take you to the cited thing, they are designed to take you to the citation of the cited thing.
>
>I was talking about that full citation in the bibliography or reference list. Those are typically very richly tagged (at least _adequately_ tagged) to enable CrossRef resolution, which I think would provide useful semantics for accessibility. They work extremely well for citations of journal articles; less well but better all the time for citations to books, chapters, conference proceedings, standards, websites, etc.
>
>--Bill Kasdorf
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken [mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 11:33 AM
>To: Robin Berjon; public-digipub-ig@w3.org
>Subject: 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 16:31:53 UTC