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Thread: accessible quoting styles in emails?
Number of posts in this thread: 7 (In chronological order)
From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 5:40AM
Subject: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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A recent thread on the italian "webaccessibile" mailing list has been discussing the issue of quoting in email replies.
<http://itlists.org/pipermail/webaccessibile/2006-June/037240.html>;
Although most other lists use the standard inline/interleaved replies <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Inline_replies>;, this list uses a different format proposed by Roberto Scano (in this article, also in italian <http://www.webaccessibile.org/argomenti/documento.asp?DocID=222>;) which essentially removes the ">" signs and prefixes each quoted fragment with the name of the original author, followed by your own name and your specific reply...
Apparently, this makes quoting easier and more readable, but recently there have been a few dissenting voices (including mine) on the list. Any thoughts? Does the standard inline quoting cause any issues to users of AT, or those with cognitive disabilities?
Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor
External Relations Division
University of Salford
Room 113, Faraday House
Salford, Greater Manchester
M5 4WT
UK
T +44 (0) 161 295 4779
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www.salford.ac.uk
A GREATER MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY
From: Karl Groves
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 5:50AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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Have any of the people currently debating this topic actually observed
disabled users using e-mail?
I'm sorry, but this "debate" you reference really sounds like a lot of the
debates in the Accessibility community, where there are a lot of people
arguing back & forth about it who are basing their arguments solely on
conjecture, without ever having done any actual observation of disabled
users.
Karl L. Groves
>
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 6:00AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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Patrick Lauke wrote:
> which essentially removes the ">" signs and prefixes
> each quoted fragment with the name of the original author,
> followed by your own name and your specific reply...
[snip]
> Does the standard inline
> quoting cause any issues to users of AT, or those with
> cognitive disabilities?
Unfortunately my Italian is non-existent, but I have heard that it can
be difficult when using a screen reader, as there is no differentiation
between quote and new content. Depending on the user's settings, using
quote marks often works better.
There would be a couple of different aspects to pull apart: best
practice, standard practice, and what currently works.
My initial reaction is that we should stick to 'standard' quoting
methods and the user agents should make it easier.
For example: If you use Thunderbird for email lists, previously quoted
items are given a border on the left and right which has been visually
translated from the greater than signs. It also works with nested
quotes, adding borders for each nesting.
That isn't much help for screen reader users right now, but presumably
if it can be programmatically detected easily and consistently, it
shouldn't be that hard to do for other user agents?
Kind regards,
-Alastair
--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
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From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 6:10AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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> Karl Groves
> Have any of the people currently debating this topic actually observed
> disabled users using e-mail?
>
> I'm sorry, but this "debate" you reference really sounds like
> a lot of the
> debates in the Accessibility community, where there are a lot
> of people
> arguing back & forth about it who are basing their arguments solely on
> conjecture, without ever having done any actual observation
> of disabled users.
Those were my feelings, exactly - particularly because Roberto's original article doesn't really mention any real users of AT etc having problems, but merely a "this is what would most likely happen, so I had this genius idea..."
I'd nonetheless be interested if maybe, just maybe, there's some truth behind it all that we've all missed so far...
P
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor
External Relations Division
University of Salford
Room 113, Faraday House
Salford, Greater Manchester
M5 4WT
UK
T +44 (0) 161 295 4779
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
www.salford.ac.uk
A GREATER MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY
From: L
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 6:20AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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"Does the standard inline quoting cause any issues to users of AT, or those with cognitive disabilities?"
For my part, I quite often find it difficult to determine who has said what within an email that quotes in this style.
With Jaws it is possible to configure it to use a different voice for text within quotes, which is one solution, but for quoted text that is prefaced by a punctuation mark, for example the greater than sign, it becomes a little more tricky.
It's particularly noticeable when someone quotes two or three people in the same email, before inserting their own response. It can quite quickly become unintelligible.
There is also, in some cases, the additional irritation of having to wade through large amounts of header information if people haven't bothered to tidy up the mail they're quoting from. There's only so much information about who sent what, where and when that you need to hear and particularly in MS clients, there's a whole bunch of this type of information for the taking.
To that end, the scheme suggested, of putting the name or initials of the person to whom the quoted text belongs, before the quote would work reasonably well. However, as an idea that's a fairly major overhaul of the current system, it might be hard to encourage its take-up.
I personally find using quote marks the most sensible idea, surrounding quoted text with quote marks and all that. *Smile, but of course that still doesn't unravel those threads where multiple sources are being quoted.
Regards,
L
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 6:40AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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L
From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Mon, Jun 05 2006 7:10AM
Subject: RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?
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(a rough example below - not usually containing a top post like this)