Adam Craven - Four Shapes wrote:
He was adamant that the abbreviation title tag problem was hardly going
to affect any screen reader users. Why? Because by default, the title
attribute isn't used much. Users of JAWs 9, 7.1, Windows eyes 6.1, Hal
9.91 have to edit the preferences to start reading the title tag in
abbr.
Thanks for sharing this information with the list, though I did note
that reading @TITLE was a non-default configuration option during the
extensive discussion of this problem last year:
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-April/009416.html
And users who don't change the default settings are the most
important to accommodate - they're in the majority.
Sorry, but a problem being rare is not the same as it being "bollocks".
Actually, from lurking on mailing lists for screenreader users, changing
settings seems commonplace. Of course, correspondents might be
disproportionately expert on those lists.
However, as I again noted last year, changing the behaviour for @TITLE
seemed unlikely to be a popular configuration choice. I don't recall the
subject coming up on the lists I'm on since. Of course, someone
encountering an accessibility issue with microformats might have no idea
what was causing the problem.
Still, catering to the "majority" of screenreader users is reasonable if
we're using the underlying (X)HTML standards in the right way.
I wasn't persuaded that the abbr-date-title pattern was a correct use of
ABBR or @TITLE back in April 2007, and I'm still not persuaded today:
* I just don't buy that "Monday" is an "abbreviation" of
"2007-08-08T12:12" in the same way as "W3C" is an abbreviation of "World
Wide Web Consortium". Consequently, I don't think it's a correct use of
ABBR. None of the alternatives suggested by the WASP Accessibility Task
Force had this particular problem:
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/
* More weakly: some versions of ISO date times are more human-friendly
(and more screenreader-friendly) than others, but I'm not persuaded that
publishers would normally choose such a representation if it weren't
intended it for machine rather than human consumption, so I think it's a
dodgy use of @TITLE. Given part of the rationale for using @TITLE is to
make this data "visible" to end-users, it seems a tad inconsistent to
bank on it not being rendered to screenreader users.
So I tend to regard abbr-title-date as a failure to live up to
microformats' mission to build "upon existing and widely adopted standards":
http://microformats.org/about/
We'll have more in-depth tests and reports done in a month or so.
I look forward to these with interest.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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