Re: Alert: accessibility and HTML Q element

Here is a solution that may be worth considering:

1. The user agent must delete any quotation marks that occur in the text
immediately adjacent to the start and end tags of the Q element.

2. Once any such quotation marks have been deleted, the user agent is
required to insert quotation marks in accordance with any applicable style
sheet. Speech-based user agents are of course exempt from this
requirement.

Incidentally, the practice of misusing the BLOCKQUOTE element as a means
of indenting text in circumstances in which no quotation is intended,
should be strongly discouraged. This issue ought to be discussed in the
WAI markup guidelines. In braille, block quotations are treated
identically to in-line quotations. They are never indented, and are always
enclosed in quotation marks. Sometimes a long quotation is treated as
though it were a separate paragraph, in which case the first line only is
indented, and the text is surrounded by quotation marks. Thus, the misuse
of BLOCKQUOTE would be of concern to braille readers.

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 1997 18:27:28 UTC