Thierry Koblentz wrote:
I agree with this hCalendar issue [2]:
"The use of abbr for dates is incorrect. "August 5th, 2004" is not the
abbreviation of 2004-09-05. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth."
But it was rejected as "false statement".
It says "See this article for an explanation of this use of <abbr>: Human
vs. ISO8601 dates problem solved" [3]
FWIW, I don't agree with this at all. The specs say [4]:
"The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the abbreviated
expression itself, as it would normally appear in running text. The title
attribute of these elements may be used to provide the full or expanded form
of the expression."
Tantek has been violently opposed to any criticism of his idea to
pervert ABBR to shoehorn machine-readable data into a human-readable
document - despite evidence that, for screen reader users that have
automatic title expansion of ABBR enabled, this results in complete and
utter jibberish. I proposed a simple change from using ABBR to using
SPAN, so
<span title="20050125">January 25th</span>
instead of
<abbr title="20050125">January 25th</abbr>
but he simply dismissed it - strangely, by saying that we need to
provide evidence that using span won't have side effects to screen
reader users. Huh? We report a problem that happens right here, right
now, and a simple (I would have thought) fix, and he refuses to
aknowledge the fix until we can prove it won't have an adverse effect on
screen reader users which are currently already affected? Weird circular
logic...
See http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/ for some
further discussion.
Even more bizarre is the use of ABBR to encode geo information, a la
<abbr class="geo" title="30.268735;-97.745209">Austin, Texas</abbr>
This truly stretches the "semantic" idea of what an abbreviation
is...and will sound absolutely bizarre in a screen reader.
Incidentally, WaSP ATF have been working on providing the
pseudo-scientific rigour of proof demanded by Tantek, but since we all
have dayjobs, and the difficulty of getting a large number of screen
reader users to test, it's proving slow. If anybody's interested in
helping out, give me a shout!
Patrick
--
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
______________________________________________________________
Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
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Take it to the streets ... join the WaSP Street Team
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