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RE: accessible quoting styles in emails?

for

From: L
Date: Jun 5, 2006 6:20AM

"Does the standard inline quoting cause any issues to users of AT, or those with cognitive disabilities?"

For my part, I quite often find it difficult to determine who has said what within an email that quotes in this style.

With Jaws it is possible to configure it to use a different voice for text within quotes, which is one solution, but for quoted text that is prefaced by a punctuation mark, for example the greater than sign, it becomes a little more tricky.

It's particularly noticeable when someone quotes two or three people in the same email, before inserting their own response. It can quite quickly become unintelligible.

There is also, in some cases, the additional irritation of having to wade through large amounts of header information if people haven't bothered to tidy up the mail they're quoting from. There's only so much information about who sent what, where and when that you need to hear and particularly in MS clients, there's a whole bunch of this type of information for the taking.


To that end, the scheme suggested, of putting the name or initials of the person to whom the quoted text belongs, before the quote would work reasonably well. However, as an idea that's a fairly major overhaul of the current system, it might be hard to encourage its take-up.


I personally find using quote marks the most sensible idea, surrounding quoted text with quote marks and all that. *Smile, but of course that still doesn't unravel those threads where multiple sources are being quoted.

Regards,
L