Re: [whatwg] <time>

Lachlan Hunt 2009-03-12 12.35:

> Another potential problem solved is helping to distinguish arbitrary 4 
> digit numbers from years, so that screen readers can pronounce them 
> correctly. e.g. If 1983 is meant as just a number, it should be 
> pronounced as "one thousand nine hundred and eighty three". But if it's 
> meant as a year, then it's conventional to say "nineteen eighty three" 
> instead.  Although, I'm not certain if this is a real problem or not, I 
> could be completely wrong about this.  I've been told that screen 
> readers have settings for this and possibly some limited heuristics for 
> detecting if a given number is a year or not.

Perhaps answer to the screen reader confusion: On the Microformat 
<abbr> design pattern homepage, a comment[1] informs that

<p>a party in <abbr title="20070312T1700-06"> March 12, 2007 at 5 
PM</abbr>

would be read by Jaws as

"a party in Twenty million seventy-thousand three-hundred twelve 
tee seventeen-hundred dash zero six"

That is, the user looses information two times: The content of 
<abbr> is lost. And the title="" attribute is read as if was some 
kind of number. (Webstandards.org also discusses this problem[2].)

Clearly, @datetime (or @isotime, as I would prefer) will be read 
as a date by Jaws. But - that doesn't necessarily mean that 
@datetime will be read at all.  Probably only if the content of 
<time> doesn't make sense to the user will @datetime be consulted. 
  Because, as you say, the UA and the user have much better chance 
of making sense of a time kept in the <time> element - so this 
should make the ISO date less necessary to consult.

[1] 
http://microformats.org/wiki/abbr-design-pattern#Accessibility_issues
[2] http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2009 02:38:29 UTC