Re: Footnotes -Reply

to follow up on what T. V. Raman said:

> Why is the issue of how notes are numbered a special access issue?
> 

This issue is not unique to the visually-impaired user group, but
it is special for them because they are closer the edge and are
more likely to be materially hurt by its absence.

I got the PDF version of the HTML 4.0 document and it is very
hard to use as a reference because there are no page numbers in
the table of contents and no section numbers for the element and
attribute indices to refer to.  Basically useless for anything
except a cover-to-cover serial read.  Bummer!

This will be fixed by the printing-control capabilities of CSS2,
I hear [maybe].  We need to let people know that blind users
care about this capability.

Just as the sighted often want to go to the low-tech output of a
laser printer for extended reading, the blind often want to
retreat to the comfort of being offline with just their favorite
screen reader and a flat ascii file.  In any medium where the
links are not hot, some symbolic means of tracing the links has
to be introduced.

I agree that generic means should be used to supply this.  But it
is still an accessibility issue because the visually impaired
want to add their vote to make sure that this works.

What is special about a note is not what is at the end of the
link but the relationship of what is at the end of the link to
what is at the start of the link.  The link to a note is a
presumptively terminal branch in the text tree.  Ninety-nine
times out of one hundred, the next action following on reading a
note is to return.

A natural encoding of this would be by CLASS attributes in
anchor elements similar to the REL attribute.  [By the way, when
CLASS was introduced it should have recognized REL and REV as
pre-existing instances of the CLASS class.]

Actually, NOTE should also be a predefined CLASS of DIV since one
wants to be able to put in the HouseRules document a rule that
there shall always be a return link at the end of the NOTE in
hyper-capable media which turns into the page number of the
origin of the link-to-note in print.  This is in the class of
content rules that govern HTML building blocks below the CSS
level.

Then serial numbering of link-to-note occurrences -- optionally
by class if multiple classes of notes have been defined -- in the
text can be done under stylesheet control.

I have seen textbooks that use multiple classes of references
much as in intelligent programming environments.

--
Al Gilman

Received on Saturday, 2 August 1997 18:19:53 UTC