[All text below from the posts, not from me] http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2008/03/accessibility_problems_with_mi.html
Part of my job is investigating new technologies that we might want or need to support on the Mass.Gov portal. A colleague brought microformats to my attention a year or so ago. Although I found it alluring—re-using standard markup to provide richer content—there were troubling accessibility issues. [...] The abbr design pattern is also used by some to provide translations. Unless someone wants to declare that there is a One True Language, this is not only problematic for people using AT, it not semantically defensible. [...] There has been resistance from the microformats community to addressing these conflicts. This is dismaying since one their basic tenets is to give precedence to use "in the wild" and this is how AT products actually behave. There was a big hullaballoo about this in May 2007, but there has been no change since then. This leads me to believe that the microformats folks just do not care about accessibility to the extent that I need to. If Massachusetts pursues enriching our content, RDFa seems a more likely candidate. We prefer to adopt things that have been created and promulgated by standards bodies: they are more stable, the deliberative process surfaces and resolves problems beforehand, and are the only reliable basis for interoperability. http://realtech.burningbird.net/semweb/accessibility-and-microformats/ Standards by general consensus rarely works out. For instance, the HTML5 working group has 504 members. How the heck can you get anything accomplished when you have 504 members? -- David Janes Founder, BlogMatrix http://www.blogmatrix.com http://www.onaswarm.com http://www.onamine.com _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss