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Re: use of <pre> tag

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Nov 4, 2010 4:30PM

Hi Julie

Welcome to the list.

The short answer is: yes, it is required.

If I am correct in interpreting what you are saying, you essentially have no
mark-up other than <pre> in the entire document - in that case, whilst the
document is not "inaccessible" as such, it contains absolutely no semantic
mark-up and can not be considered accessible.

I would go beyond that to say that the presentation of the document might
also prove problematic for those with no disabilities as there is little to
guide the user as to the hierarchy of the document - so this becomes a
matter of usability rather than just accessibility.

Whilst you could argue that all the content is 'technically' accessible (in
a very tick-box approach) that doesn't make it genuinely so...and I know a
great many people on this list would even disagree with the first part of
what I've said there ;]

If you think you have great many lengthy legal documents to deal with all I
can say is that I worked as part of a team on http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ who a
few years back added a great many back-years catalogue of UK legislation to
their on-line catalogue. Not only did much of the data have to be imported
from scratch, but the work on the XML schema and HTML/CSS mark-up to be used
was very extensive....legal documents rarely have less than the 6 levels of
heading provided in HTML for a start ;]

Best regards