Re: Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

I might be missing something, but you mention copy and paste erasing the levels, but I don’t see that happening in documents like any of the W3C TRs (good example of docs with many nested locators). Now the generation of those levels is done by respec/bikeshed (someone correct me on which is responsible for this), but it does present an interesting example of a doc in HTML that makes this very possible. But copy-paste also grabs the rendered text, not the code (or shouldn’t be), so if it’s rendered as “2.1.1 Title” then it should not be lost.

I don’t think we can leave this niche to PDF considering the ongoing accessibility issues with PDF (and yes I know there are accessible PDFs, but even those have barriers). We should be able to do this in HTML/EPUB.

-Wendy

From: James Gifford <james.gifford@nitropress.net>
Date: Friday, August 11, 2023 at 2:23 PM
To: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>, Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org>, public-publishingcg@w3.org <public-publishingcg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

[EXTERNAL] This message comes from an external organization.
To be honest, my first and so far only thought is that perhaps this is a niche best left to PDF. There aren't many such, but the complexities of numbered structures within structures may not be worth the vast effort of reinventing for EPUB.

  —Jim


On 8/11/2023 12:15 PM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
Why not examine how PDF does this – since the vast majority of legal documents have been (and continue to be) distributed as PDF files for 25+ years now including many of them required to be accessible.

While the full details of creating accessible PDFs can be found in ISO 14289, PDF/UA (https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-14289-pdfua/) – you can also check out what the W3C specifically says about the handling of Lists in PDF with respect to WCAG at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf#PDF21.


Leonard

From: Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org><mailto:charlesl@benetech.org>
Date: Friday, August 11, 2023 at 1:31 PM
To: public-publishingcg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingcg@w3.org> <public-publishingcg@w3.org><mailto:public-publishingcg@w3.org>
Subject: Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

EXTERNAL: Use caution when clicking on links or opening attachments.


Hello everyone,

I am struggling to find what should be the best practice around Legal documents or other documents which have a lot of nested numbered lists.

Should these lists be encoded as true lists in HTML or should they be hard coded within the <p> tags.
I see pros and cons for both ways.  For accessibility reasons having these as true lists is important for navigation etc. but if you are trying to cite some legal section 2.5.3 for example and copy that out and past it into another document it usually will revert to 1.1.1.  There may be other concerns I am not thinking of especially say a multi-page document and needing to keep track on a different page where the numbering scheme left of so you can update the list’s starting point.

Any thoughts on how these heavily nested list documents should be encoded from an accessibility perspective.


Thanks
Charles
EOM

Charles LaPierre
Principal, Accessibility and Content Quality Architect
Benetech
Twitter: @CLaPierreA11Y


--
________________________________
NitroPress Communications
A Component of Nitrosyncretic LLC
SW Aurora, Colorado 80013 USA
+1 (303) 981-7115 m
www.NitroPress.net<http://www.NitroPress.net>