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Re: Link labels and APA citations

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 17, 2014 10:25PM

Great comments, Karen.

Yes, the accessibility community can reach out to the "standards makers" ...
Chicago, Oxford, et al.
They should reach out to them.

And WAI/WCAG should reach out to them and bring both professional editors
into their working group (especially those with SMT/journal experience) as
well as the overseers of Chicago, Oxford, et al into the fold.

But instead of making publishers change their system that 1) has been in
place for 100+ years, 2) affects millions of publications and documents, and
3) affects everyone who publishes, why not work with them to create a better
solution than the current myopic, narrow-minded requirement currently in
WCAG?

If you attempt to change the entire publishing industry, it will be like
trying to change the direction of a cruise ship. It's such a huge entity
that change is slow, takes a lot of effort, and misses the dock most of the
time.

A better solution would have them keep their current, established methods
for publishing, and probably add something to WCAG to make links more
understandable and navigable for AT users...without changing established
publishing methods.

The current WCAG standard for "meaningful text" for hyperlinks is meaningful
only to those who are blind or have low vision and invoke keyboard shortcuts
to voice all the links on a page. Everyone else is disadvantaged, including
the fully sighted audience and the publisher, because the document now must
use convoluted language to meet WCAG.

So the end result of this standard is that it helps a minority portion of
the audience at the expense of the majority. How crazy is that! No wonder
publishers aren't buying into accessibility.

It doesn't have to be that way.

We can develop a better method, technique, guideline, standard, whatever,
that works for everyone.

But for that to happen, the accessibility community will have to work with
the publishing and advertising industries (the main communicators) to
jointly develop a truly workable solution.

These folks control all forms of communication on all topics for all
purposes. It's a waste of time to fight them. Instead, you'll accomplish
more if you join them and bring them into the fold.

- Bevi Chagnon
- PubCom.com - Trainers, Consultants, Designers, and Developers.
- Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
Accessibility.

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Sent: Friday, October 17, 2014 4:03 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Link labels and APA citations

On Fri, 17 Oct 2014, Chagnon | PubCom wrote:
> Why has the accessibility community developed standards that are in
> direct conflict with professional publishing requirements that have
> been in place for 100+ years?

Alternatively, can the accessibility community reach out to APA, Chicago,
MLA, and the others to see if we can be a player in the next edition of
each of the standards?

> How likely is it that professional writers and editors, both those in
> the SMT (science medical technical) fields and conventional
> publishing, will go against their industry standards and switch to
whatever WCAG says?

It is 0% likely, because trade journals and scholarly publishers have
standards, and if you don't follow them, you won't get published. I happen
to think not using the serial comma is an abomination, but if I want my work
to get published in one of my primary journals I do not use it. It's not a
matter of choice or decision, it's a matter of published or not published.

> Wouldn't it be more effective for users if WAI/WCAG would first learn
> the professional publishing standards, and then meld with the industry
> rather than fight it?

Working with the industry makes more sense than just passively learning
from it. The fact is in enormous amount of published work is still paper and
is going to be for the foreseeable future in scholarly work, and the lion's
share of scholarship is actually both paper and digital. Could we work with
the style guide creators to help them develop standards that work with
paper-only, electronic-only, and hybrid?

Deborah Kaplan