Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
title="2007-03-12T17:00:00"
Can you confirm that:
a) This will in fact solve the screen reader problem
It will not. Though I agree with Jeremy and Tantek that this solution
is slightly better than the current recommendation. It is still far
from accessible. Tantek and I discussed this format at SXSW as a
possible solution, but its only moderately helps for dates, and
doesn't help much for datetimes:
"2007-04-27" is mostly accessible as it's usually read as either "two
thousand seven. four. twenty-seven." or "two thousand seven dash four
dash twenty-seven." Sometimes the leading zero is spoken, too.
It's important to note however, that everything past the T is usually
gibberish. Even given the *ideal* situation where the ':'s are not
spoken as "colon", the time zone delimiter is spoken as "minus", and
the colon separated pairs are spoken as "o'clock," the result is
still less than ideal.
T12:00:00-06:00
Best case scenario "tee twelve o'clock zero zero minus six o'clock."
Worst case scenario: "tee one two colon zero zero colon zero zero
dash zero six colon zero zero"
This also doesn't account for screen readers set to read in other
languages. Besides pronunciation phonemes, reader languages have all
sorts of rules for writing conventions (i.e. sometime speaking "five
o'clock" for "5:00" in English). I can't begin to guess what problems
that that would entail. We'd need to talk to the internationalization
team at the manufacturers.
I can try to meet with the i18n people on the Voiceover team, but as
today, Voiceover doesn't read any title attributes and so doesn't
have an issue with abbr-design-pattern. The problem is with the more
popular readers, Jaws and Window Eyes.
b) This still conforms with all the relevant W3C recommendations
It conforms to the ISO spec for dates, and the W3C specs for markup,
but the article points to a WCAG reference that indicates abbr
[title], acronym[title], td[abbr], and th[abbr] are meant for
speaking. Ex. "20 lbs" should be spoken "twenty pounds." This is not
implied for other elements like span[title], em[title], etc.
The article proposes keeping abbr-design-pattern for uses such as:
<abbr class="country-name" title="Japan">JP</abbr>
But abolishing its misuse in the following: dates, long/lat, and RFC
type values.
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2007-03-27T12:00:00-06:00">Noon Central</
abbr>
<abbr class="geo" title="30.300474;-97.747247">Austin</abbr>
<abbr class="type" title="home" xml:lang="es">Casa</abbr>
Cheers,
James
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discuss@microformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
