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Bug 8746 - Text separator between links in markup example
Summary: Text separator between links in markup example
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/history.ht...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: a11y
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2010-01-14 15:15 UTC by Gez Lemon
Modified: 2010-10-04 14:28 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description Gez Lemon 2010-01-14 15:15:37 UTC 
The markup example uses a text separator between links:

<a href="/">Home</a> | <a href="../">Photo index</a>

Putting them in a list and using CSS or separating them with a decorative image with null alt text would be better for accessibility.
Comment 1 Michael Cooper 2010-02-11 17:26:49 UTC 
Per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html, the HTML A11Y TF does not plan to formally work on this issue at this time. This does not mean the TF has no interest in it, but does not have immediate plans to work on it. The TF may review the issue in the future.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2010-02-17 22:32:33 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Any AT that can't handle links separated by vertical bars is doomed on the Web today. Huge numbers of sites do this. ATs have to support this to remain competitive. Changing the authoring behaviour rather than changing the ATs is not the right investment tradeoff (there are orders of magnitude more authors than ATs).

I'm happy to mention this in the spec somewhere if that would help. If you think that would be necessary, please reopen this bug or file a new one. If you have any suggestions as to what advice to give AT users, that would be great. Should we say something specifically about vertical bars, or should it be any punctuation at all? (For example, are links separated by hyphens a similar issue?)