RE: 4.13.1 Bread crumb navigation - use of right angle brackets

jukka.k.korpela wrote:

"I would normally expect people to listen to a few items in the list, if they only know that there is a group of some number of related items. 

For a breadcrumb like this, it is probably faster to listen to them all than to listen to a a description that says that there is a group of four related items, listen to a few of them, realize that this sounds like a breadcrumb, and decide whether you wish to listen to the rest, too."

 

Would you? The trouble is that you're making that decision. If you remove that useful semantic information, you prevent a screen reader user from making an informed decision for themselves.

 

"It’s all very different if there is a list of fourty-two items. Then it is useful to know that they form a group, if you have some way of skipping the rest after listening to a few of them."

 

This is the critical point. If you don't know how many items there are, you can't make an informed decision about how to interact with the content. The list markup provides this information.

 

I may have missed your original point, but why do you believe the list semantics are unimportant? I can speak for their value as a screen reader user, and as a developer I don't see any hardship in coding them either.

 

Léonie.