Re: [CSS21] Inaccessibility of Index to CSS2.1 / Violation of WCAG

On Thursday 20 December 2007 20:14, fantasai wrote:
> Al Gilman wrote:
> > The index for CSS2.1
> >
> > <http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-CSS21-20070719/indexlist.html>
> >
> > replicates the inaccessibility of the index to CSS2, in that it
> > uses chapter/section numbers as hyperlinks without so much as a
> > title to indicate to which entry in the index the repetitious
> > numeric hypertext points.  The PF WG's designated reviewer stopped
> > counting when he reached 250 instances of the hyperlink text "1",
> > which only took the reviewer into the "I" section of the index
> > (specifically, on the target that hyperlinks to the definition of
> > "<integer>", a fact which was only discoverable by following the
> > link).
>
> Recorded as issue 21
>    http://csswg.inkedblade.net/spec/css2.1#issue-21
>
> It would help a lot if you could point to an example of a W3C report
> index that does follow the accessibility guidelines.

The alphabetical indexes of the CSS specifications are automatically 
generated. The CSS2 spec uses some Perl scripts created by colleagues 
of mine back in 1998, the CSS3 modules use a C program that I made[1]. 
Writing code to generate an index can be tricky, so I don't want to 
touch the code until I'm sure of what has to change.

For the moment, I've changed the code of both programs only to add TITLE 
attributes to the links, because that was easy to do.

Does anybody have examples of indexes in HTML, that look good with and 
without style sheets and are accessible even if people read the links 
out of context?

The indexes must support multiple links per index term, sub-terms at 
least to two levels and a distinction between the defining instance and 
other occurrences. E.g.:

    ...
    conformance, _1_, 2
    containing block, 1, _2_, 3
        initial, _1_
    content, 1
    ...

(The source mark-up[2] from which that is generated looks like this:
"<dfn title='containing block!!initial'>initial containing block</dfn>")

And does anybody know of programs that generate such indexes?


[1] http://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils
[2] http://www.w3.org/Style/spec-mark-up#Index



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 25 January 2008 15:31:55 UTC