Re: Descriptions of citations

This doesn't seem to be a blindness related accessibility issue.  Whether
your sighted or blind, one still only sees or hears the following string of
characters:

"Arthritis Res 2001, 3(3): 168-177"

The question I ask Brooke is how does the sighted visitor know that this
really represents:

"the journal Arthritis Research, published in 2001, volume 3, issue 3, on
pages 168-177," ?

I would suggest that somewhere on the site you explain what citation format
conventions you are using.  This text explanation is all it would take.

In my opinion any special mark-up would be overkill since nothing would
support it anyway.  If the citations are coming from a database via an XML
string of data, then perhaps you could the software add a title= attribute
to contain the XML human readable explanation of journal, published,
volume, issue, pages, etc. However, there are (or at least were when I went
to college) conventions or citation standards that seemed less cryptic than
the convention you are using, one that uses the full date format, uses the
abbreviation for pages as pgs., eds. for editors, v for volume, etc. would
be more helpful to all visitors, perhaps even the cognitive impaired.

Regards,
Phill

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2001 18:55:41 UTC