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

On 04/27/2011 01:16 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Belov, Charles
> <Charles.Belov@sfmta.com>  wrote:
>> Alas, we are seeing a side effect of comment-trimming when replying.
>> This whole thread started with my post on Monday 2/7/2011 at 12:56 p.m.,
>> which stated a real-world case as to why it was a problem for screen
>> readers not to read the<ol>  bullets as written:
>>
>> "in the case of a public meeting, where we have a legally published
>> agenda, and items are called by the chair by letter, it would be
>> important to me that the rendered speech be:
>>
>> A. First item
>> B. Second item
>> C. Third item
>>
>> and I would definitely *not* want to leave this decision to the user
>> agent."
>
> So, this is already up to the user-agent visually.  If the UA is
> ignoring CSS, or there's a network error making the stylesheet load
> fail, or some other circumstance that results in the "list-style-type"
> property not being properly applied to the list, you'll lose the
> letters as they flip back to plain numbers.  Similarly, if you use the
> counter() function to number your headings, and the CSS is lost,
> you'll lose your heading numbers.
>
> The correct answer to this case is that, when the list markers are
> vital to the content, they should be part of the content.  When
> they're not vital, the loss of information from the style being lost
> or not inferable is unfortunate, but not killer.  If you really need a
> way to control how list markers are read out beyond the basic "bullets
> vs numbers" distinction, this can be addressed by a specialized
> property in Speech, but I don't personally think it's vital to
> address.

I think being able to control how list bullets are read out in speech
rendering is important enough to be addressed if we're going to do a
speech module. And the basic "bullets vs numbers" distinction isn't
addressed by HTML in any case.

As for your assertion about semantics vs. presentation, that doesn't
work in practice. In practice, people using HTML rely on HTML to
create the list markers. The only common exception here is lawyers,
who need ironclad interpretation of their documents, and will go
through the trouble of putting their list bullets in the text itself.
As for HTML, it doesn't have a way of creating ordered bulletted
lists or unordered lettered lists. Which is admittedly a problem for
the HTMLWG to solve, but given that we are responsible for being able
to render an appropriate representation of whatever they come up with,
we're not off the hook here either.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 21:06:35 UTC