RE: Guidelines for email

Couple of answers or rather proposals.


1)   As George noted It was our intent to have the initials appear ONLY at 
the beginning of the message.  And then only when you are inserting text 
within the body of old text.        If you are only inserting one 
paragraph, just mark the front end of it.   The end of the paragraph 
indicates the end of the comment.

2) if inserting multiple paragraphs of text you can use
Start GV:
And
End GV:
To indicate the beginning and end.   In this fashion you don't need to set 
your screen reader to read greater than signs (which messes up your ability 
to read the rest of the text in the message).    If you just see someones 
initials in front of a paragraph, they have just inserted one paragraph. 
 If they insert enough that they feel they need to break it up into 
paragraphs they can mark the beginning and the end.

3) In answer to the other question,
Including just a chunk of someone else's text would be handled by
Tom Thompson wrote:
On a line by itself just in front of what someone else wrote.
You can then either put
End of Tom Thompson
Or
My Response
Or
GV:
Or anything else that seems logical or that your email program adds to the 
start of yours text.   It isn't critical what you write at the start of 
your comments each time unless you are doing lots of them throughout and 
you want people to be able to jump to your additions.  if you want them to 
jump to them you should use GV:

4) Neal suggested that there be a unique character in front of all initials 
so that you could jump to the start of each and every persons.
My response: Good suggestion Neal.  However rather than having to type 
unique characters before and after the intials, what if you just used two 
semicolons after the initials as in GV semicolon, semicolon.
GV::
It would be unique.
It would be easy to type.
Would it cause more verbal clutter with synthesizers if they hit a double 
colon?  That is, do they just pause at a single colon but pronounce a 
double colon or something?    Can people advise?  Or suggest some simple, 
easy to type but unique character?   Maybe a right square bracket then the 
initials and a colon.    Right brackets usually do not appear as the first 
character of a line.  (left square brackets maybe but not usually right 
square brackets.)


We need to keep this simple of course.

Any other suggestions for ways to address this that are simple yet 
effective with most screen readers?



Gregg

Received on Friday, 14 November 1997 00:42:59 UTC