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

Léonie Watson wrote:
>
> 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.
>

The information in using <ul> is just that there are are some items 
collected into a list. It is “semantic” only in the odd IT sense of the 
word. Semantics aside, the markup does not say anything about the 
meaning of the content.

So what I would do, by not using <ul>, is that  prevent some software 
that has been programmed to count the items in it and tell the number to 
the user from doing so. Conversely, if I do use <ul> in order to make 
such a thing possible, it is not semantic, it is not structural, it is 
simply authoring with some client software in mind. That would be OK if 
the amount of work needed and the possible negative side effects weigh 
less than the gain. I don’t think we know enough about any part of this 
equation.

> 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.
>

No, it does not give any more information about the item count than some 
alternative markup. It may trigger counting in some software, but that’s 
a different thing.

> I may have missed your original point, but why do you believe the list 
> semantics are unimportant?
>

I have not seen any reasonable definition for the meaning of “list 
semantics”.

I can see the practical value of using <ul> or <ol> to indicate that 
there is a longish list of items, especially if there is no verbal 
indication before the list. The main reason for using <ul> and <ol> 
would then be the navigational impact on some user agents. And that 
would be fine for things that are normally rendered as bulleted or 
numbered lists. But breadcrumbs are something different.

I asked what the benefit would be in hearing an item count in the case 
of a short list. For example, instead of “You are here: Main, arrow, 
Products, arrow, Dishwashers, arrow, Second hand”, would it be better to 
hear something like “You are here: A list of four items, bullet, Main, 
bullet, Products, bullet, Dishwashers, bullet, Second hand.” What would 
hearing ”A list of four items” help? You are saying that it tells that 
the list is short, but breadcrumbs are meant to be short anyway. And 
when they are long, they can be long because the items are long, rather 
than than due to the number of items.

What I would like to understand is whether and how this item count 
thing, or some other special effect that <ul> might trigger, actually 
helps in the case of a breadcrumb.

> 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.
>
Coding lists is not difficult if you write the markup yourself. It can 
be a different matter if some software generates markup for you or if 
you would convert existing markup to use lists. And then there is the 
task of styling. You would need to style <ul> in this context very 
differently from its default style – to something that you automatically 
get if you just have links with separators between them. Whenever you 
use some markup and then override all of its main effects (the default 
rendering), the question arises whether you are using the right markup.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2013 15:07:22 UTC