Re: [css3-lists] [css3-speech] Interaction between list-style-type and speak properties

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:23 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> On 04/26/2011 08:00 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> Reading the list marker shouldn't need to pay attention to the list
>> style - that should be just a visual thing, I would think.  Screen
>> readers should be able to read<ol>s without caring about what goes on
>> in CSS.
>
> Determining whether it should be read as a bullet or a number matters,
> though, and that's not an <ol> vs. <ul> thing. Also, alphabetic lists
> are read out differently from numbered lists. This is also important
> to reflect into speech.

You're correct on the bullet vs number distinction.  That can't be
completely captured, though - you can say that 'repeating' types are
bullets, but 'non-repeating' may or may not be.  It'd probably
sufficient to just read 'repeating' counter styles and strings used
directly in list-style-type as bullets and everything else as numbers,
though.

It doesn't seem like the distinction between numeric and alphabetic is
important.  They're just alternate ways of representing numbers.
We've already made the point that legal documents, where the precise
marker is important, should use inline text for their markers (which
reminds me that I need to add the
display:marker/list-style-type:inline feature).  In other documents,
the fact that a list is presented as "A" instead of "1" is mostly
irrelevant.  This is styling information, not semantic content.

To further complicate things, counter styles can use images as glyphs.
 These don't have readable content at all (and I'm really not
interested in trying to apply alt text to images specified in CSS).

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 18:13:45 UTC