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From: Mark Pilgrim
Date: May 7, 2002 2:40PM

> Also note that on IE (on Windows), there is no indication of the
> quotation
> being a quotation when a screen reader is used, unless the screen
> reader can
> somehow recognize and communicate that italics is used.

I'm not on my JAWS-enabled Windows machine at the moment, but I'll take
your word for it. However, my feeling is that Q *is* a valid HTML tag;
it's been around for more than 4 years (HTML 4.0). If a screen reader
is not aurally indicating the start/end of a quotation that uses the Q
tag, that is a bug in the screen reader. But that's not really helpful;
they are what they are.

Lynx visually indicates the Q tag properly (by putting in quote marks).
This is independent of any CSS tricks to make them curly, of course,
since Lynx doesn't use CSS.

> Besides, the trick does not work on browsers that do not support the
> Q
> element and do not have style sheets enabled (or have a user style
> sheet
> overriding the relevant rule in the author style sheet).

All true. Netscape 4 (all platforms) does not support the Q tag at all.
IE on Windows (all versions) does not support the Q tag at all. That
pretty much kills it. Use quote characters instead.

You can even use the Unicode representation for curly quotes (details
here: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/ ). This works on all
browsers, even Netscape 4. Heck, even Lynx, which is smart enough to
display them as straight quotes instead.

-Mark Pilgrim
http://diveintomark.org/


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