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RE: More on greater-than symbols

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Oct 2, 2002 3:15AM

Joe Clark wrote:

> 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),

But that's adaptation to ugly reality, _not_ compliance to standards, which
you say you're calling for. Besides, there's not much a screen reader _can_
do with layout tables other than processing them cell-wise and letting the
user specify the cell to be accessed, by row and column number, which is the
same as they need to do for a poorly-designed tabular data table.

> 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, ¶).

No, we cannot. That's _not_ what they should do. There are several
international and national standards that say that ">" is GREATER THAN SIGN,
and this is certainly a correct and common use for it, no matter what we
think about other possible uses.

What would be, in your opinion, the correct reading for ">" in breadcrumbs?
Actually, it's difficult to figure out good wording. More importantly, the
results are catastrophic if the same words are used when a screen reader
presents, say, examples in an XML tutorial, or simple mathematical
expressions. If you are suggesting that screen readers should make
contextual analysis and then guess which words to use, I would say that you
are asking for too much; and they would be bound to guess wrong at times
(and IMHO rather often).

> Authors have to write to standards.

OK, I cite ISO 10646 and ISO 8859 (pick up any part thereof). Oh, and
ISO/IEC 15445. Your move.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi/
Diffuse Business Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All:
http://www.diffuse.org/accessibility.html


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