Element Level Customization

Dear Andrew,

If authors used semantic markup inline then user style sheets can give
most of the customization we desire. Line, letter and word spacing,
color (back and fore), font family, font style, all caps, ... are all
trivial. All that is necessary is finding elements. Below is my
confusion regarding 1.3.1.

What is the difference between changing the visual presentation so
that the user can perceive information and relationships, and changing
the audio presentation for perception of the same?

If you look at Failure F2 of 1.3.1, Example 3, it specifically
identifies bold as an annotation that cannot be designated by style
alone.  I am wondering what the difference is between bold text
(<strong>) and <dfn>, <cite> >, <sup> , <small> and other inline tags.

Here is how semantic markup can be used visually to support perception
of page semantics. In a normal page <dfn>, <cite>, <em>, and <i> might
all be styled the same way, italics. For a normally sighted user that
is good enough, because scanning documents for specific text is easier
with full sight. Using all the visual styles available, a program that
can distinguish between these language structures, can give them all a
visually distinguishable look. When a user with low vision is scanning
for a definition visually, it will look different from simple
emphasis. That makes finding say, text in a definition easier to find.
I re-style <dfn> with font-family Lucida Sans Typewriter, and I change
the color of <em> tags and drop italics.

Example 1: Citations: Typically, look like this, (Allen, J., 2016,
p243). Comma separated lists are not rare in language. Here is an
example, there are pairs that do not look different in different fonts
e.g.  (I1l, S5, 0O). From a blurry distance this might look like a
citation, but different styling will make them look different.

Example 1 also applies to screen reader usage. Right now, most of
these items are not scanned in JAWS or NVDA because they are used so
erratically. However, consider the document scan for citations above.
If you are looking for citations rather than all parenthesized text is
a much smaller search.  Here is how I would conduct such a search in
NVDA today. 1) I would use “h” to step through headings to find the
section that contains my term. 2) Then I would step through elements
one by one using CTL + DOWN ARROW.  With <cite> markup I would ignore
all element types that were not citations.

So, how do we disentangle these other cases from the bold case that
was given explicitly in Example 3 of Failure F2? Does F2 apply to
<strong> and <em> and nothing else? Where do we draw the line?

I am really just confused? I don't know when to expect inline markup
and when not. It seems ambiguous.

Thanks for the time today. I hope this clarifies my issue.

I have sent this to the group because this may take many brains to sort out.

Wayne

Received on Thursday, 3 November 2016 20:48:53 UTC