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

Whether the semantics come from the element or ARIA roles isn't really consequential to building the accessibility tree.

Unordered lists aren't a panacea since you litter the display with bullets when they can't be suppressed. Suppressing bullets (or any marker) can also lead to AT no longer recognizing the list unless you re-apply the list role.

Matt
________________________________
From: Lars Wallin <lars@colibrio.com>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2023 6:00:21 PM
To: Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>
Cc: Reid, Wendy <wendy.reid@rakuten.com>; James Gifford <james.gifford@nitropress.net>; Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>; Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org>; W3C Publishing Community Group <public-publishingcg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

Matt, I imagine that one would use unordered lists instead of ordered lists. This would keep the built in semantics, as well as styling in place.

On Fri, 11 Aug 2023, 23:10 Matt Garrish, <matt.garrish@gmail.com<mailto:matt.garrish@gmail.com>> wrote:
Might be a case for using ARIA list and listitem roles with an inlined identifier to avoid the rendering issue that come with html list styling? Not sure how it would differ from PDF. (It's also imperfect since the visual styling would more heavily depend on CSS.)

It sounds like you're trying to solve usability and accessibility issues, though, and I'm not sure you'll succeed at both. Extracting nesting context, for example, isn't simple no matter the format.

Matt
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From: Lars Wallin <lars@colibrio.com<mailto:lars@colibrio.com>>
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2023 3:12:19 PM
To: Reid, Wendy <wendy.reid@rakuten.com<mailto:wendy.reid@rakuten.com>>
Cc: James Gifford <james.gifford@nitropress.net<mailto:james.gifford@nitropress.net>>; Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>>; Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org<mailto:charlesl@benetech.org>>; W3C Publishing Community Group <public-publishingcg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingcg@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: Question regarding Legal Documents and Heavy use of Nested Numbered Lists

PS. Maybe you can use the setsize and posinset values to make the AT narration correctly reflect the original, final rendering as well? Must try and see how this could be accomplished though. DS

On Fri, 11 Aug 2023, 21:03 Lars Wallin, <lars@colibrio.com<mailto:lars@colibrio.com>> wrote:
Yeah, this is a tricky part of using an algorithm to generate numbering. It's wonderful in the editing stage of the document, but presents problems when as you say Charles, content is removed from its original context.

The reason that it "works" in PDF is that it is no longer dynamic of course, but has been rendered to a static representation.

I guess that is what the W3C respec tool does as well, and maybe this should go into some note of how to best handle a final version of an EPUB document.

Cheers,
Lars

On Fri, 11 Aug 2023, 20:53 Reid, Wendy, <wendy.reid@rakuten.com<mailto:wendy.reid@rakuten.com>> wrote:

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

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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

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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



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