RE: Accessible quotation style in email (was Re: HTML messages)

John Slatin, then Joe Clark:
<blockquote>
> I think the problem is that the *line* isn't semantically significant 
> when you're quoting.

It's much more semantically significant if you and your correspondents
use 
mailers that support flowed text, like Eudora, M2, Thunderbird, Apple 
Mail, and-- wait for it!-- Hotmail.
</blockquote>

Well, maybe so. I stopped using Eudora in 1996 because a new release had
come out that didn't play nicely with JAWS. I can't use Thunderbird
because there's no screen reader support. I don't know what M2 is. And I
don't use Hotmail because I've never been able to get past the capcha.


"Good design is accessible design." 
John Slatin, Ph.D.
Director, Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin
FAC 248C
1 University Station G9600
Austin, TX 78712
ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu
web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility/


 



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Joe Clark
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 11:18 am
To: WAI-GL
Subject: RE: Accessible quotation style in email (was Re: HTML messages)



First of all, it's much more important that Working Group members cease 
top-posting.

You can turn off HTML in Outlook and force Outlook to use what is 
euphemistically called "Internet-style quoting":

<http://email.about.com/cs/oetipstricks/qt/et012401_p.htm>
<http://www.expita.com/nomime.html#out2002>

<http://www.slipstick.com/mail1/quote.htm>

> As I pointed out to someone who wrote me off-list, the print world has
> had effective conventions for handling quotations for a whole lot
longer 
> than email has had them.

Print conventions are inapplicable.

> I think the problem is that the *line* isn't semantically significant 
> when you're quoting.

It's much more semantically significant if you and your correspondents
use 
mailers that support flowed text, like Eudora, M2, Thunderbird, Apple 
Mail, and-- wait for it!-- Hotmail.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On 
> Behalf Of David Dorward
> Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 9:11 am
> To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
> Subject: Accessible quotation style in email (was Re: HTML messages)

And we see that John unnecessarily top-posts text that was already 
correctly quoted.

And yes, we need an automatic converter from at least flowed text to 
blockquote, as I called for previously:

<http://blog.fawny.org/2004/11/06/flowed/>

-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
       --This.
       --What's wrong with top-posting?

Received on Monday, 25 April 2005 16:33:59 UTC