Bringing, for discussion, a proposal from the WaSP ATF co-lead in
response to today's article.
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/#comment-57820
Patrick Lauke wrote:
so, looking at some “harmonisation” ideas then, what i would
suggest a way forward may be:
1) heavily editing the page in the microformats wiki about abbr-
design-pattern to quite clearly state that, because of abbr’s
semantics, which assistive technologies like screen readers rely
upon, the pattern should only ever be used if the machine-readable
part in the title is also very clearly human-readable (and by that
we don’t mean somebody who’s into geocaching and therefore loves to
hear lat and long, or somebody who really likes their time to be
read out in full ISO format).
2) introducing a new design pattern page…i’d call it the title-
design-pattern. this can show pretty much what the current abbr-
design-pattern page has, just with a variety of other elements
(like span, div, p, object) and a clear warning that this pattern
should not be used with elements where title has been given
slightly “special” meaning and/or are used by current AT. should
also include a note that this replaces the abbr pattern of old, and
that abbr-design-pattern in its new form is a very limited subset
of the title-design-pattern
3) trawling the rest of the microformats wiki to remove examples of
problematic abbr-design-pattern use and replace them with more
generic title-design-pattern examples
I would emphasize that we should indicate title-design-pattern should
not be used to hide human-readable data, but only be used in the
problem cases where the data is not human readable, or in i18n cases,
where the human readable version is in another language. Due to
opening up the pattern a bit more, there will also need to be a flag
to indicate when to use title attribute versus contents. Something
like this "useTitle" class:
Uses title value:
<span class="dtstart useTitle" title="2007-03-27T12:00:00-06:00">Noon
Central</span>
Does not use title value:
<a href="http://example.com/"; class="fn org url" title="Visit the
company web site!">Widgets, Inc.</span>
Thoughts?
James
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