WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: use of <pre> tag

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Nov 5, 2010 9:12AM

Hi Julie

You weren't explicit, but that was pretty much what I expected - partially
from experience having seen something similar before.

At least you have electronic versions to work from - I have been faced with
print only material in the past so that is a big step.

Deborah is quite right - if the documents are fairly consistent you can
write regular expressions in PERL (a number of HTML editors also support
their own flavour of RegEx so don't panic if you don't have PERL developers)
to automate a huge amount of the work, but you will always need a human to
sense-check what comes out. On bulky documents this can save weeks or
months of work.


@ Mike, Section 508 is based largely around the WCAG and semantic mark-up is
at the very core of those. You won't find anything that explicitly says
"you may not write your entire document inside a <pre> tag but I think that
would be pretty much taken for granted given all the other guidelines. Even
if it (and I entirely doubt it - see below) conformed it would still be an
example of tic-box conformity, not genuine accessibility.

Section 508 (d) "Documents shall be organized so they are readable without
requiring an associated style sheet". Now that does not explicitly state
you need semantic mark-up but it is certainly implied.