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More on greater-than symbols

for

From: Joe Clark
Date: Oct 1, 2002 2:27PM

I hate when this happens.

We got on a big discussion of what are admittedly very fine
distinctions among punctuation marks chosen to separate breadcrumb
trails-- greater-than, vertical bar, guillemet, right arrow,
pilcrow, bullet, etc.-- because we were concerned that screen
readers might mispronounce them.

Well, why aren't we worried that screen-reader makers haven't
updated their products?

Just as screen readers had to be upgraded to deal with the *reality*
that tables are used for layout (many dozens of pages at my sites
still use them, for example), we can reasonably expect that they be
updated to understand common usage of ASCII characters like ">" and
how to voice non-ASCII characters like right arrow and pilcrow
(paragraph mark, ¶).

These are all HTML 4/XHTML 1-compatible characters. You are writing
fully standards-compliant code in specifying them, assuming you use
correct character entities. And the *function* in which you are
using them is a de facto standard in real-world Web sites.

There's actually a precedent. In the brief time I used OutSpoken for
Macintosh, it correctly understood the florin character (Option-f on
a U.S. Macintosh keyboard, ƒ) as an abbreviation for "folder,"
a custom that was in use from the earliest Macintosh systems (it
predates my memory, and I've used Macs since the day they came out)
up to but not really including OS X. A system filename like
"Documents ƒ" would be voiced correctly as "Documents folder."

Now, that was nearly ten years ago. And here we're going through
contortions because Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, Alva Access Group,
et al. cannot be bothered to upgrade their products to understand
common usage of standard HTML?

Authors have to write to standards. Makers of adaptive technology
have to correctly and fully implement those standards.

--
Joe Clark | <EMAIL REMOVED>
Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques:
<http://joeclark.org/access/>;


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