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Re: A case for artifacting bullets in unordered lists in PDFs

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jul 24, 2013 3:18AM

Am 24 Jul 2013 um 07:08 schrieb Chagnon | PubCom < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> AT users really just need to know it's a bullet.

why would that be? Why discard information that is there already? Would you discard a symbolic characters in the middle of a text?

Am 24 Jul 2013 um 05:09 schrieb Ryan E. Benson < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> [REB]: What should be placed as the value of the actualText if a
> non-standard bullet (such as U+25B6 (right facing triangle))? Just bullet?

and

Am 24 Jul 2013 um 07:08 schrieb Chagnon | PubCom < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> If we spend too much time on this low-level stuff, we'll never have enough
> hours in a day for the major stuff, like writing a good document, designing
> it, writing informative alt-text, and tagging it for accessibility.

if the label character has a valid Unicode code point (outside of the private use area) - *** no action is required *** - the text is already accessible. It is up to an AT with a text to speech function to read it out loud accordingly. In this case it hopefully would read "right facing triangle"; if an AT developer decides to give a user options, like "turn this off for a while because I can't stand listening to "right facing triangle" more than three times on a given day", that's fine, but that's not anything to do with how the content / document has been prepared.

The easiest way to find whether a bullet has a suitable Unicode code point: copy and paste it into a strictly text only / no formatting text editing window or text field (the "Save as…" field of any application's user interface will do) and look at the appearance of the pasted character: if it still looks the same it has a reliable Unicode code point, if it has a replacement character (empty square, or strange looking face mask, or something like that) it does not have a Unicode code point that will work, and some action should be taken (preferably ActualText, with a suitable replacement text).

Olaf