RE: Discussion list guidelines

Hi Al,

Thanks for the review comments

Regarding relying on Greater than symbols to indicate what text is new.
As I understand it,  The greater than symbol is only helpful If you have 
your screen reader set to pronounce them.  If you do then it screws up your 
ability to listen to the paragraph (it keeps getting interrupted with 
"greater than". )   If your screen reader doesn't pronounce them then they 
are invisible and of no help.

Perhaps screen readers could be programmed to announce them at the start of 
a paragraph only and not within a paragraph.   It could also announce when 
then went away.  (say with   "beginning marked paragraphs",   "Ending 
marked paragraphs",  Beginning double marked paragraphs"  Etc.   This would 
be very nice and might eliminate the need to mark thinks as well.    I 
guess the text editors or mail programs would also have to add a feature to 
jump to the next paragraph that is not marked or something....

But from the meeting I though we were just trying to come up with 
recommendations that would work today with todays screen readers to make 
our work on the WAI listserves more readable by our colleagues with screen 
readers.  Did I miss something?   Did we go off with the wrong charge?  If 
so let us know.

Regarding marking the ends of comments.
The end mark is not needed if you can very easily tell when the person's 
comments end and the continuation of the original text resumes (or if the 
beginning of the next persons comments are marked.)   Otherwise you should 
assume that all the paragraphs are left justified with no greater than 
symbols.      Then mark what you need to, to make it clear who is saying 
what.

See the problem?
Do you see an easier way to solve it than the guidelines???
That's what these are posted here for.  To gather suggestions.

Thanks much

Gregg


PS  For those who do not use screen readers,  take some of these messages 
(that don't have comments marked with initials or whatever) and copy them 
into your word processor (or leave them in email if it has good search and 
replace functions).
Now search and replace all greater than symbols with nothing and also 
remove any spaces at the left margin.
Then try to read the messages and figure out who said what..   or when a 
person stopped their comments and the next person began.   (If line lengths 
are visibly different you may also have to re-word wrap the text so 
paragraphs are not visibly different)
This should give some idea of what a message with comments in would look 
like to a screen reader set to ignore greater than symbols.






-- ------------------------------
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Human Factors
Dept of Ind. Engr. - U of Wis.
Director - Trace R & D Center
gv@trace.wisc.edu    http://trace.wisc.edu
FAX 608/262-8848
For a list of our listserves send "lists" to listproc@trace.wisc.edu


-----Original Message-----
From:	Al Gilman [SMTP:asgilman@access.digex.net]
Sent:	Tuesday, December 02, 1997 8:36 AM
To:	w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject:	Re: Discussion list guidelines

ASG:: responses introduced with initials and double colon.

to follow up on what George Kerscher said:

> Here is the latest version of the list guidelines developed by
> Gregg and myself with help from many others. Comments welcome.

ASG::  OK, I'll try to remember the double colon.

Is the quote-marking with "greater" character OK so long as one
prunes the quotes to just what is needed?

I am not sure the end-mark is worth fighting for if
greater-quoting is used.

There comes a point from time to time when we have worked out
something worth remembering (like this set of guidelines) that it
is time to create a web page so there is a stable URL to come
back to.

Eventually I hope our list-member's handbook will cover using
email and Web pages as a team.

Another related issue is how we move documents around.

-- Al Gilman

Received on Thursday, 4 December 1997 00:59:40 UTC