[uf-discuss] Re: One more shot at accessible hCalendar

[Ciaran McNulty]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Toby Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm sorry, but this sounds like a really bad idea. Parsers would need to
> maintain translation tables for day and month names, plus abbreviations
> for them,

I agree that it sounds a bit over the top for hCalendar but it's not
*that* ridiculous.  Most languages have a toolkit for displaying dates
in different languages, how is the reverse particularly harder?

> plus some sort of heuristic for figuring out the language of the
> page. (In practice, many authors leave out lang/xml:lang attributes, and
> Content-Language headers.)

As an aside, xml:lang and lang can apply to any element and inherit
downwards, so aren't particularly more difficult to add to markup
than, say, a @title.

<div class="hcalendar" lang="fr"> is perfectly valid.

> Andy Mabbett's proposed "data:" prefix already solves the abbr design
> pattern accessibility issue and can be implemented in just a few lines of
> code. All we need to do is build support for it into parsers. (Cognition
> has supported it since alpha2.1.)

If the problem is 'machine readable dates get read out sometimes' I
don't see how the data: prefix solves that.

I'd also like to see a bit more evidence of how common uFs are treated
by screen readers - is there a wiki page somewhere?  A lot of the talk
about 'accessibility' that goes on on this list seems to come from
non-experts making assumptions (that's not to say Charles Belov is
doing this, I'm speaking generally).

-Ciaran