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

The problem here is that what you are describing as lists are not lists in legalese. These are all sections and sub-sections.

I analyzed a large body of source documents from courts and legislatures back in my consulting days. My family has more than the average share of lawyers, too. My dad had me file clerking in a major law firm in Lansing, MI when I was 18 where I had access to the firm’s (physical bound book) library.

I know of some efforts to codify legalese in XML markup[1]. However, I have not touched legal content in XML in over twenty years myself.

It comes down to this: if there’s semantic markup then accessibility is enabled. How people go about (or don’t go about) fulfilling an accessible UI for this content is one of those issues where “your mileage may vary.”

That’s my $.02 USD. And yes. I’m still out here! Mostly lurking and paying attention.

1. legalxml.org/


Jean Kaplansky
jeankap@gmail.com
jeankap@earthlink.net
Tel: 518.930.1068
On Aug 11, 2023 at 1:55 PM -0400, Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org>, wrote:
> 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