- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 23:08:40 -0500
- To: "w3c-wai-gl@w3.org" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
At 03:16 PM 2001-01-15 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote: > >Question: Has it -ever- been proven in practice that use of <Q> >increases accessibility for people with disabilities? Are there >current assistive technologies which recognize and use the <Q> >tag in a meaningful way? > Jason's point about Brailling quotes is good, except that Braille translation is language-dependent, so we don't need a language-independent indication for quotations here. The language-specific quotation marking usage will suffice. But I may not fully understand the interaction. The <Q> element originally came out of internationalization considerations. See e.g. <<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-html-wg/1997OctDec/thread.html#26 5>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-html-wg/1997OctDec/thread.html#265> The language in the WCAG 1.0 examples, of course, just came from "do it right per the W3C Recommendation." The notable accessibility problem was in abuse of BLOCKQUOTE for indent, and Q just came along for the ride in the "do it right" clause. This shows that accessibility is not the only group who got things in HTML 4 that browsers somehow never got right. I believe that we could add a note in the errata document to the effect that "until user agents" trumps "use <Q>" under the present circumstances so that it is clear that <Q> is not required for AA at this time. I wouldn't want to go further than that with the revision of what we ask people to do without re-connecting with internationalization, because there may be things we want to do in terms of an alternate approach in XHTML 2.0 and knowing which way that is going could help us to steer where we go with WCAG 2.0. Al
Received on Monday, 15 January 2001 23:00:48 UTC