RE: Seeking *opinions* as part of a larger research issue.

Hi John,

 

> should those text strings STILL be marked up as hyperlinks?

 

Technically, you can markup them up as inactive hyperlinks (a without an href), but your first example doesn’t really even qualify as that. I wouldn’t do anything special with dummy URLs, to be honest, except maybe mark them with code tags.

 

Doesn’t this fall under 1.3.1 info and relationships, though? When you have text that only looks like a URL but is not meant to be followed, marking it as a hyperlink would seem to violate the principle (i.e., it adds info that doesn’t actually exist). I don’t know if that SC makes unnecessary tagging a violation – I’ve always seen it enforced for adding missing structure – but there’s an argument that it should capture misapplied tagging. It’s probably not something we’d take up in the EPUB accessibility spec, as it’s not specific to ebooks.

 

Agree with everything you’ve already said about the annoyance and confusion factors. I’d only add that it’s annoying to everyone, not just persons with disabilities. It makes you wonder if there is some reason why the link is there and whether you should follow it just to see where it goes. 

 

Matt

 

From: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> 
Sent: January 16, 2023 2:10 PM
To: public-epub3@w3.org; public-publishingcg@w3.org; epub-higher-education@lists.daisy.org
Subject: Seeking *opinions* as part of a larger research issue.

 

The use-cases are pretty simple:
1) an ePub book has text content on the page that is a URL (i.e. it quite literally reads "www.examplesite.com <http://www.examplesite.com> "). The URL does not (and is not expected to) actually resolve anywhere, it's just an example or placeholder text.
2) an ePub book has content on the page that was once an active hyperlink, but the link no longer exists.

The question is: for both of those use-cases (where the "print" is offering up a text string formatted as an URL, but there is no actual URL to resolve to), should those text strings STILL be marked up as hyperlinks?

From a strict conformance to WCAG perspective… well, WCAG is silent on this specific topic (and so it seems is ePub Accessibility 1.1).
I strongly suspect that there are arguments for both sides of the discussion (“should all printed URL’s be active links”?), but I am currently backing the perspective that having users (readers) follow inactive links (or presenting users with inactive links to follow),
a) potentially places negative cognitive strain and confusion on some users,
b) potentially demands unnecessary interactions (clicking a useless link) that could be problematic for mobility impaired users, and
c) delivers zero quality for any effort invested by the user.

My questions are:
1) do you agree or disagree with my reasoning? (If you disagree, might I ask for your counter-argument please?)

2) have you encountered this before? If you have, can you tell me what you ended up doing? In particular, if you work in EDU (office of accommodation, etc.) where ePub remediation is part of your work/tasks, do you have a 'standard' policy or solution to either of these use cases?

3) any other thoughts or comments? (Note: we're looking for a solution that is also scalable, FWIW)

Thanks in advance for any feedback!



JF

-- 

John Foliot | 
Senior Industry Specialist, Digital Accessibility | 
W3C Accessibility Standards Contributor |

"I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." - Pascal "links go places, buttons do things"