accessibility

Accessibility

This page is for keeping track of issues relating to microformats and accessibility, in the hopes that any potential accessibility issues are resolved quickly, and for documenting techniques for making microformats more accessible.

We should all strive to make our published microformats, parser implementations, and not least this wiki, as accessible as possible, to all users, regardless of their physical abilities and needs. Readers are advised to follow the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, to at least level 2. Further advice is available on the Accessify Forums.

Advantages

Over and above the increased convenience they bring, some microformats have potential accessibility advantages.

hCard

• tel in hCard: use style="speak-numeral:digits", so that telephone numbers are read by aural browsers as, for example, "five-five-five one-two-three-four" and not "five-hundred and fifty-five, one-thousand, two-hundred and thirty-two".

Issues

hCalendar

• In

  <abbr class="dtend" title="19970401">April 2, 1997</abbr></div>

  "19970401" is not an abbreviation, in any sense, of "April 2, 1997", but of "April 1, 1997".

External discussions

Mailing lists

• Microformats and Semantic Structure (part 2) - 2006-10-11 in w3c-wai-ig.
• hCard and hCalendar Formats - 2006-08-03 in w3c-wai-ig.

Fora

• Use of 'abbr' in microformats - 2006-09-20. Issues: use of 'abbr'

Accessibility of this wiki

• Large blocks of italic text are inaccessible to many readers, including people with types of visual impairment, dyslexia, etc. [1], [2]. [3], [4], [5] Andy Mabbett 14:33, 26 Nov 2006 (PST)
• Using emboldening and italics to differentiate types on, e.g. the cheatsheet pages hcard-cheatsheet, is unhelpful to users of assistive technologies, text-only devices, etc. A number, letter or symbol should additionally be used. Andy Mabbett 14:33, 26 Nov 2006 (PST)
  • I think the emboldening is fine as it marks up the required properties. The italics are a bit of a problem but keep it simple at the moment. Additional characters can’t be used as they would break the class="property" template. Colours would be a way but are inaccessible to some users, so there is no real solution to that problem for now. Julian Stahnke 22:55, 26 Nov 2006 (GMT)
    • "I think the emboldening is fine" - how would you understand emboldening in a text-only browser like Lynx, or in an aural browser? Andy Mabbett 15:17, 26 Nov 2006 (PST)
      • Ups, I just assumed that it would use strong and em tags. Yeah, well, let’s think about it. Julian Stahnke 23:22, 26 Nov 2006 (GMT)
  • Of course, one could add that stuff after the class="property" thing. That might look a little cluttered though. I’ll consider that for the next revision/next cheat sheet I do. Julian Stahnke 22:57, 26 Nov 2006 (GMT)
    • All that's needed is:

* class="vcard" (1)

instead of:

* class="vcard"

Andy Mabbett 15:24, 26 Nov 2006 (PST)

• • Now resolved. Thanks to all who helped. Andy Mabbett 10:30, 11 Dec 2006 (PST)

• Duplicating link text breaches WAI-WCAG 1 guideline 13.1 Clearly identify the target of each link and is unhelpful to users of assistive technologies and other agents, which provide links in a stand-alone, out-of-context list. Andy Mabbett 10:29, 11 Dec 2006 (PST)

See also

microformats-issues