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Re: Quoting previous emails

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 8, 2009 6:42AM

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:16 AM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> When punctuation settings are set in JAWS to"Read all" it will identify
> quotes. The > signs are generally put in by the email programs and JAWS
> reads each > sign.

And this is unfortunate. A much better behavior would be for screen
readers to identify sections that begin with > and simply read "Begin
quote" at the beginning and "End quote" at the end, and then ignore
all of the >'s in between. I suppose a good, accessible e-mail client
could do the same thing. And all e-mail clients should function like
Gmail, which hides long quoted sections of messages that don't appear
to be relevant to the conversation (e.g., anything repeated below a
top-posting).

I do find it interesting that nobody has yet to figure this out
despite the fact that e-mail is about the longest lasting form of
online communication we have. It's not going away any time soon
either, so isn't it about time someone figure out a reasonable
solution to the e-mail quoting issue? It's not a complicated issue to
solve.

Jared Smith
WebAIM