changing abbr-design-pattern to title-design-pattern?

Tantek Ã‡elik wrote:

> However, I'm against contorting microformats because of
bugs or
> suboptimal behaviors in <1% marketshare browsers.

On my reading of the HTML 4.01 specification and WCAG 1.0,
the title
attribute was clearly intended to provide additional /human
readable/
information:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#adef-t
itle

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-ABBR

htt
p://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#text-abbr

On this reading, the use of title for information formatted
for machines 
not people is a hack. So I think it's erroneous to describe
reading out 
the ISO date time format from title as a "bug". I
agree having a setting 
to recast ISO dates into a localized, human readable format
might be an 
optimal behaviour, but it would be best if such conversion
was triggered 
only in contexts where the ISO format was not meant for
direct human 
consumption. In this sense, describing it as
"suboptimal" behaviour 
presumes screen reader foreknowledge of microformats, which
seems to go 
against the already quoted credo of the microformats
movement.

Your interpretation of the relevant specs may be different,
of course. 

With regards to the attempt to list screen readers on the
microformats
wiki, I'd like to draw correspondents attention to the list
of past and
present screen readers on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screen_reade
rs

The current microformats wikipage's emphasis on the latest
versions is
somewhat misplaced. It's important to remember that partly
because
popular screen reading software is prohibitively expensive,
many screen
reader users are using older versions. I'm subscribed to
several screen
reader mailing lists. The latest version of Freedom
Scientific's JAWS
(probably the most popular screen reader) is 8. But judging
from mailing
lists dedicated to JAWS and other screen readers, users of 8
are
outnumbered by users of 7. Many correspondents are still on
6. Some few
correspondents still use 5 or even 4.51, e.g.:

http://www.freelists.org/archives/jfw/03-2007/msg0085
7.html

http://www.freelists.org/archives/jaws-uk/03-2007
/msg00125.html

With web browsers, one might have a moral case for putting
the onus on
users to upgrade to free and technically superior
alternatives, though 
taking such a moral position appears not to be a widely
viable 
commercial practice. But in the case of screen readers, the
free 
solutions still have a long way to go to be very effective
replacements 
for their expensive peers, so a similar moral argument is
difficult to 
construct.

I'm afraid asking for estimates of the size of the userbase
for each
version is a bit unrealistic. There's very little public
information
about such matters.

The World Health Organization estimated that in 2002, 37
million people
around the world (0.59%) were blind and an additional 124
million
(1.99%) had low vision:

http://www.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA59/A59_12-en.p
df

3.58% is only a little short of estimates of Safari's market
share and
much higher than estimates of Opera's:

h
ttp://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

Of course, because people with visual impairments are likely
to have
poorer life opportunities and to be older, I'd guess they
are
under-represented in uptake of new technologies and the
internet generally.

In 2002, Chris Hofstader of Freedom Scientific testified
that "There are
approximately 80,000 registered users of JAWS":

h
ttp://web.archive.org/web/20021015235548/http://www.microsof
t.com/presspass/trial/mswitness/2002/hofstader.asp

I assume he meant worldwide, but it's hard to be certain.

According to a study of screen reader use published in
December 2003, a
spokesperson for the US National Federation of the Blind
estimated that
in the USA, JAWS had 65% of the screen reader market and
GW-Micro
Window-Eyes had 35%; also JAWS was the software most
commonly used by
U.S. federal workers:

http://www.redish.net/content/papers/interactions.html

If these figures held true beyond the US, one could predict
around
40,000 registered Window-Eyes users worldwide. However,
non-US markets
may favour other screen readers such as the Brazilian screen
reader
MicroPower Virtual Vision.

In a published interview with Access World in March 2007
that proved
controversial and has subsequently disappeared from the
site, Hofstader
apparently said that 2,000 copies of screen reader software
are sold per
month:

http://blogs.
sun.com/korn/date/20070309

Any sale of a Mac is also a sale of VoiceOver, an effective
screen
reader. Any download of Ubuntu Linux or Solaris is also a
download of
Orca, an increasingly competent open source screen reader.

With regards to the particular issue at hand, it's fortunate
that many
screen reader users probably have not configured their
software to read 
title automatically since:

1) It's not the default behaviour in JAWS or Window-Eyes.

2) Current screen readers do not (AFAIK) discriminate
between familiar
and unfamiliar, or even first-occurrence and repeated,
abbreviations and
acronyms when reading title attributes.

3) title is sometimes abused to spam search engines.

http://juicystudio.com/article/using-title-attribute.php

Suboptimal UA behaviour and bad authoring practices don't
excuse
additional misuse by the microformats movement, of course.

But if title must be used, putting human-hostile title
attributes on an
empty element seems a better hack than misusing abbr or
acronym,
/subject to testing with a range of assistive technology/.

A specialized data attribute is under consideration by
WHATWG for use
with scripts, but it might also help with this problem â€¦
eventually.

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/what
wg-whatwg.org/2007-April/010800.html

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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changing abbr-design-pattern to title-design-pattern?

Thread: changing abbr-design-pattern to title-design-pattern?