WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Link labels and APA citations

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 17, 2014 1:25PM

Ed wrote: "Is there a way to meet both APA and best practices."
John wrote: " Something else to consider; the transient nature of URLs. How
many times have you found your citations have become dead links....?"

To Ed, no. Read below. WCAG directly conflicts with professional publishing
standards, in more ways than this.

To John, the professional journal and scientific publishing industry uses
DOI, Document Object Identifiers. Quoting from http://www.doi.org/, "The DOI
system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration
and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on
digital networks." Wikipedia has a more readable definition here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier

If the links in scientific materials are out of date, then it's safe to
assume that the author/publisher hasn't heard of DOI and, therefore, doesn't
know what he's doing.

This thread brings up a much larger issue:
Why has the accessibility community developed standards that are in direct
conflict with professional publishing requirements that have been in place
for 100+ years?

How likely is it that professional writers and editors, both those in the
SMT (science medical technical) fields and conventional publishing, will go
against their industry standards and switch to whatever WCAG says?

Wouldn't it be more effective for users if WAI/WCAG would first learn the
professional publishing standards, and then meld with the industry rather
than fight it?

Editorial style guides have been around for 100+ years. Whether it's Chicago
(The Chicago Manual of Style) or AP (Associated Press) or NLM (National
Library of Medicine-PubMed Central) or Oxford/Harts (Oxford Guide to Style),
these worldwide style standards are the norm of publishing for US, British,
and worldwide scientific material. The APA style manual (American
Psychological Association) is just one of the smaller style guides developed
for their specific niche of science and now used throughout academia. Every
publisher has an internal style guide...even my small publishing firm has
one.

Millions of documents are produced daily to these standards, yet WCAG
ignores them and says, essentially, "do it our way or you'll be out of
compliance."

Doesn't make much sense to me, nor to my editors who are trying to find ways
to do their job and meet accessibility requirements.

If we're trying to make content more accessible, why aren't we working with
the established communication industries (like academic publishing) rather
than dictating rules that don't make sense to them?

- Bevi Chagnon
- PubCom.com
- Trainers, Consultants, Designers, and Developers for Publishing.
- Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
Accessibility.