RE: Best citation format for accessibility

Two comments for Robin:

--I think the point that the reader of a scholarly article will understand that the link is to a citation (whether with AT or not) is a good one. Print relies on the same assumption, that the form of the citation itself is sufficient, without a label saying it's to a citation. I don't mean to imply that I wouldn't want to have an explicit semantic expression for that, just that in this context a link around a typical citation is probably self-explanatory to its intended audience.

--I love your examples, Robin. Not just the markup, the text too.

And one for Tzviya:

--Your point about multiple links to the same citation is important. Getting to the citation from each of them is not the problem. The problem is getting back from the citation to the correct place in the text where the link originated.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@berjon.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2015 9:32 AM
To: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken; public-digipub-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Best citation format for accessibility

On 24/09/2015 08:48 , Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken wrote:
> My WCAG concern is
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20140916/G53 Identifying 
> the purpose of the link. If I simply append the Name date citation to 
> the end of sentence or paragraph, is the link actually understandable? 
> Further, if the same Name Date (Smith 2015) is used repeatedly in a 
> publication, does that add a layer of confusion?

I could be wrong but I don't think that's an issue. The technique does state that if the content preceding the link provides context for it, it's helpful. So for instance, this should be fine:

    It has been established that, in dahut litters, contradextrous offspring is rarely viable <a>(Berjon 1871a)</a>.

What may be less clear is the variant (which I'm sure has a name) used when the name is part of the sentence:

    Herman <a>(1968)</a> has found significant correlation (p > 0.05) between facial hair abundance and several metrics of wisdom profundity.

When the link arrives, there is little context in which to interpret it.
Even adding title='Reference: Herman 1968' might not help since you don't yet know what statement it is backing up. That being said, scholarly articles aren't general-audience content. You have to assume that readers, irrespective of AT, are somewhat familiar with the conventions (otherwise it's just a puzzling to sighted users).

--
• Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon • http://science.ai/ — intelligent science publishing •

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2015 14:56:45 UTC