- From: Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:32:38 +0100
- To: wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org
aloha! since clarity and coherence are in short supply in my neck of the woods, i thought that i'd pass this by wai-xtech COMMENT: i think the PF/WAI should give the call for consensus for the HTML5 RDFa editor's draft http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Sep/0736.html an enthusiastic endorsement with the following caveat, which probably should be carbon-copied to the W3C Communications Team: PROPOSED: While the PFWG commends the HTML5 working group and the document's editors, for such rapid action in drafting an RDFa in HTML5 document, the PF/WAI does have a substantive comment on the use of ASCII art in the document. Currently, the document reads: <quote src="http://dev.w3.org/html5/rdfa/#invalid-xmlliteral-values"> <code>→</code> symbol is used to denote that the line is a continuation of the previous line and is included purely for the purposes of readability: </quote> but the "→" symbol is ASCII art, as it is a modality specific means of indicating a new line. This is especially problematic for those who interact with computers aurally and/or tactilely, as it creates a perceptual black hole for those for whom the character entity cannot (or cannot readily) be ascertained by a non-sighted reader. Moreover, the character entity may not be vailable in the users' system, or may be rendered as a placeholding "textual" symbol To date, four different screen readers were tested, and none were able to speak the → symbol as rendered by an HTML parser or when the symbol was copied-and-pasted into a plain text (unicode formatted) document, thereby DECREASING the document/example's readability, rather than universally enhancing it. When the glyph rendered for the character entity "→" is directly queried with a screen reader, one does not hear "right arrow" (nor is it glossed to indicate for thos whose systems cannot render or parse the character entity in any meaningful way as a "new line indicator"), but simply as "blank". When read in context using read-all or read-by-paragraph or read-by-sentence or read-by-line, the rendered glyph for the character entity is not spoken. Thus, there is a need to explore an alternate set of conventions for such useages and conventions which is not modality specific, as is the use of character entities to generate ASCII art. In terms of markup, the explanatory blurb excerpted at the beginning of this post, in which the use of → in the example which follows to indicate continuation of a line, one could encode the symbols in an ABBR <abbr title="same line">→</abbr> or <code>value=yes|no<abbr title=" default">*</abbr></code> but that tactic obviously doesn't work in cases where the document author intends raw code to be rendered in an example. Note, as well, that it is assumed in the second example, above, that the CODE element will be used by assistive technology to switch from a user's normal punctuation settings to "Speak All" or "Speak Extended" as per individual user's needs, desires, and/or preferences, so that the pipe glyph is used as a boolean indicator and SHOULD be exposable by an assistive tech to a user. POST-SCRIPT: that's as far as i've gotten -- no cut-and-dried solution to the problem statement; As for the contents of the document -- having reviewed the RDFa syntax and primer specs extensively, and having implemented RDFa in XHTML 1.1 i think that the HTML5 RDFa editor's draft should be published as a public working draft. However, the fundamental (and recurring) problem i have with the HTML5 RDFa editor's draft, which is located at: http://dev.w3.org/html5/rdfa/ is its use of non-interoperable ASCII art. It is up to the WAI when and how to address the issue of the use of ASCII art through the use of charater-entity codes that are graphics, such as a right arrow, and not "text" in the "normal" sense. -- especially those for which there are no readily available or known means of generating the intended glyph from the keyboard, so as -- for example -- to choose the previous and next sections in the multi-page "view" of the HTML5 draft gregory. ACTUAL POST-SCRIPT: a tangentally related issue is discussed from an XHTML2 point-of-view which needs to be ported to HTML5 terms and the HTML5 wiki, can be found at: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/xhtml2/wiki/XHTML2/pre_obsolete --------------------------------------------------------------------- A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. -- Arthur Bloc --------------------------------------------------------------------- Gregory J. Rosmaita - oedipus@hicom.net AND gregory@ubats.org Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/ United Blind Advocates for Talking Signs (UBATS): http://ubats.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 18 September 2009 03:33:17 UTC