Comments on: Accessibilty for content providers – quotes http://www.redefine.co.uk/blog/2007/02/28/accessibilty-for-content-providers-quotes/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:33:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis http://www.redefine.co.uk/blog/2007/02/28/accessibilty-for-content-providers-quotes/comment-page-1/#comment-195 Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:30:52 +0000 http://www.redefine.co.uk/blog/2007/02/28/accessibilty-for-content-providers-quotes/#comment-195 <a href="http://www.benjaminhawkeslewis.com/www/accessibility/q-element/" rel="nofollow">HTML quotations are a minor obsession of mine.</a> The HTML standard is entirely clear that: "Visual user agents must ensure that the content of the Q element is rendered with delimiting quotation marks. Authors should not put quotation marks at the beginning and end of the content of a Q element." The vast majority of UAs get this right. There are two main ways of dealing with IE's failure to generate quotation marks: 1. Insert quotation marks around Q with conditional comments (or, possibly, conditional compilation) targeted at IE 7 or less. In the unlikely event a user has configured JAWS to read quotation punctuation or read quotations in a special voice, this will help them. On the other hand, it will hurt Window-Eyes users who have told their screen reader to announce quotations and to read quotation punctuation, since quotations will be announced twice. 2. Forget about punctuating Q and just style it italic in IE. Because JAWS 7 (not sure about 8) doesn't actually notice Q, this will fail miserably for JAWS users. But it rewards Window-Eyes for getting it right and announcing Q. Inserting superfluous quotation marks around Q in all browsers is a non-solution since it actively reduces accessibility. Users who have CSS disabled or unavailable will see doubled quotation marks; and good screen readers will end up double-announcing quotations even in superior browsers like Firefox. And since it ignores the actual spec for Q, it arguably fails to comply with the guideline anyhow. PS It would be nice to know what sort of markup or markdown this comment box accepts. HTML quotations are a minor obsession of mine. The HTML standard is entirely clear that: “Visual user agents must ensure that the content of the Q element is rendered with delimiting quotation marks. Authors should not put quotation marks at the beginning and end of the content of a Q element.” The vast majority of UAs get this right. There are two main ways of dealing with IE’s failure to generate quotation marks:

1. Insert quotation marks around Q with conditional comments (or, possibly, conditional compilation) targeted at IE 7 or less. In the unlikely event a user has configured JAWS to read quotation punctuation or read quotations in a special voice, this will help them. On the other hand, it will hurt Window-Eyes users who have told their screen reader to announce quotations and to read quotation punctuation, since quotations will be announced twice.

2. Forget about punctuating Q and just style it italic in IE. Because JAWS 7 (not sure about 8) doesn’t actually notice Q, this will fail miserably for JAWS users. But it rewards Window-Eyes for getting it right and announcing Q.

Inserting superfluous quotation marks around Q in all browsers is a non-solution since it actively reduces accessibility. Users who have CSS disabled or unavailable will see doubled quotation marks; and good screen readers will end up double-announcing quotations even in superior browsers like Firefox. And since it ignores the actual spec for Q, it arguably fails to comply with the guideline anyhow.

PS It would be nice to know what sort of markup or markdown this comment box accepts.

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