Goodbye Yellow Right Double Angle Bracket
Summary: mono's got a brand new document title separator.
»
The Man in Blue's What's your favourite blip? sparked some interesting follow-ups, including 456 Berea Street's Document titles and title separators and Standards Schmandards's The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator. The latter proved to be quite an eye-opener.
I had previously used » as a document title separator, which is pronounced right double angle bracket. Although this particular separator looks good, its pronunciation is too long and even somewhat confusing.
Instead, I have decided to switch to the |, pronounced vertical bar.
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Using two words for a separator is of course not ideal: a single short word would be better. Unfortunately, the one-word separators have other drawbacks. The colon is used within titles, and should be reserved for that purpose. The same goes for greater and less, whose obvious semantic meanings also risk making the post title confusing. The dash was on my shortlist, but is already used to separate the document title from the browser name, and may also be part of the post title. And it seems that many screen reader users skip the title as soon as they hear it, which is understandable: who wants to listen to Microsoft Internet Explorer hundreds of times every day? The remaining options — asterisk, bullet, dot, question, section, tilde — were discarded because they either don't sound or look good, or have an inappropriate meaning, or both.
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So the vertical bar is a reasonable compromise. While at it, I reversed the order of the site and post titles to post title separator site name.
See also Page titles on news article pages (via 456 Berea Street).
Blip. Blop.
BlogAid
Help support the Asian earthquake and tsunami appeal...
Save Darfur
A preventable humanitarian crisis is raging in the Darfur region..
Rob Mientjes
Comment on November 16, 2004 at 9:34 pm
It looks good too. And thanks for the reminder: I should edit my order too.
Simon Jessey
Comment on November 16, 2004 at 10:11 pm
I have always referred to the vertical bar as a pipe. That is even easier to say!
Incidentally, if you want people to use valid XHTML 1.1 in your comments, wouldn't I be correct in saying that
andare not in the specification? Where they not purged from strict flavors of markup?Lars
Comment on November 16, 2004 at 10:37 pm
Rob, thanks. My credits for the reversal go to Roger Johansson.
Simon, yes I too have always referred to it as pipe, but apparently JAWS pronounces it vertical bar. What can you do?
About
and:They are still valid in the presentation module of 1.0 Strict and 1.1, actually. See for example the XHTML 1.1 Document Type.
Jacques Distler
Comment on November 16, 2004 at 10:51 pm
Nope. They're in the XHTML 1.1 Spec. They're not even deprecated. And for very good reason; hundreds of years of typographic convention have endowed them with roles far beyond and . (X)HTML is (by design) too semantically-impoverished to replace all these roles with dedicated elements. Replacing them with is not adequate.
Lars
Comment on November 16, 2004 at 11:13 pm
I didn't see Jacques's comment before I posted my own, but that is a much better explanation.
seriocomic
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 12:48 am
This post looked like an excuse for you to include some big kick-arse graphics....of white lines...
There was probably some interesting point to be read there somewhere — but I am transfixed by the big kick-arse graphics...
Jeff Croft
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 1:01 am
Might I suggest that a document seperator, at least in the context of XHTML, is not really a structural object and is rather presentational? I presume you are referring to this as it might be used in a breadcrumb trail, horizontal list of links, etc. If that's the case, then I would suggest a list be used in the XHTML and the seperator be handled in the presentation (usually CSS). Of course, this is not always practical, and I'm not a markup ultra-purist, so I'm not going to crash down and wreak havoc on you if you disagree.
Additionaly, even if this is handled by the presentation layer, it is still worth discussing.
Nice post.
Lars
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 2:03 am
Jeff, that's an interesting angle. I have to admit I didn't think about that; my concern was with the aural aspects of the separator. I think I disagree though: a separator is not just presentational because it has a function, which is to separate (something). But I might have to give it some more thought, now that you've brought it up.
Mike, you are so superficial.
MikeyC
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 4:21 am
For some reason I've always thought the name for this symbol (») was "chevron". I like "chevron" much better than "right double angle bracket" so I'm going to continue calling it a "chevron"
Tommy Olsson
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 8:18 am
I use the at-sign (@) myself, with the post title first. It only works in English, of course, but to me it kind of makes sense to have it read as "Very Interesting Topic (at) The Autistic Cuckoo".
Blair Millen
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 2:38 pm
Nice topic Lars... just the kick in the pants I needed to address this issue myself.
I hadn't given the topic any thought myself until I read Roger Johansson's article a wee while back... so I've just updated my own site, which now reflects your own changes: a pipe and the topic or page name before my site name.
I like Tommy's idea though.
Peter K. Sheerin
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 10:59 pm
There seems to be some confusion on the correct name for the solid vertical bar shown above, since some are calling it 'pipe', which it is not.
There are in fact two distinct vertical bar-like characters:
| (U+007C) is officially 'VERTICAL LINE' (a.k.a. 'VERTICAL BAR', and used in pairs to indicate absolute value.)
¦ (U+00A6) is officially 'BROKEN BAR' (a.k.a. 'BROKEN BAR', 'BROKEN VERTICAL BAR', and 'PARTED RULE'; used in typography, according to Unicode)
ǀ (U+01C0) is officially 'LATIN LETTER DENTAL CLICK' (a.k.a. 'PIPE')
On my keyboard, at least, typing SHIFT+ produces the vertical line character, although I have seen many keyboards that do this even though the broken bar is the glyph printed on the upper part of the key. Vertical bar – Wikipedia has a few more details.
As far as Unicode is concerned, neither of these is called 'PIPE', but my recollection is that the broken bar was historically pipe in DOS speak.
Joel
Comment on November 17, 2004 at 11:29 pm
Somewhat ironically, for the blind your title now contains two separators, » spelt out, followed by vertical bar. And though I find your titles on your three graphical illustrations quite amusing, I wonder what blind people might make of them. Is this your perverse sense of humour?
All this effort when you may not even have a single blind reader. Perhaps you will be using smaller words for the semi-illiterate too?
How blind people must laugh an empty laugh at sighted efforts to make life easier for them on the occasional website, when we place lampposts and dustbins in their way on the streets every day.
Lars
Comment on November 18, 2004 at 12:44 pm
MikeyC, I think chevrons are the brackets that denote military or police rank. Sgt. Orville Snorkel, the Beetle Bailey character, comes to mind. Similar bracket shape, but different use. But I could be wrong.
Tommy and Blair, I like the @ sign too. I overlooked it in my comparison. It's shorter and slightly more intuitive than the vertical bar. What's the catch?
Peter, thanks for the detailed explanation. It never struck me that there was a Wikipedia entry for vertical bar; there is some good information there.
Joel, good points. This particular post does have a confusing title, at least until one has read the rest of the post, yes. It wasn't meant as an expression of perverse humor, and I don't think it comes across as that to most people. It could be perceived as slightly confusing though, but if so then it's just for this particular post. However, I am not sure why you think blind people would make any more or less of the titles than you and other sighted readers do, so please explain that in case there is something I have missed.
You are probably right in that I have very few blind readers — in fact I don't think I have a single one. My readership is not the only reason I write about accessibility though — I see every weblog post and article as part of a movement that will eventually make the web more accessible to the blind and other disabled people. And that, to me, is just as important as making streets and buildings accessible. This is why I doubt that blind people are laughing at those who work hard to build an accessible web. If they do, they should let us know and we will stop or change direction. But regardless of which, I think it is worth bearing in mind that these efforts aren't necessarily as philanthropic as they may seem — waking up one day with a disability or lost sight could happen to me and you. So let them laugh, if they laugh.
Joel
Comment on November 18, 2004 at 1:50 pm
It seems to me Lars that your blackbox titles are primarily visual. As text read out the effect would be more surreal I think.
Oh, of course I agree on accessiblity, and would test in Jaws if it wasn't effectively withheld. Let's face it, the biggest move towards accessible web design for the blind would be an open source screen reader that was widely used by the blind, or Jaws being made available free to designers who wished to test their sites in it. At the moment, there is too much second-guessing in the absence of being able to directly test, just trimmings around the edges. If the sighted could properly test their sites for accessibility to the blind that would make a real difference. As it is, we sighted designers are reduced to scrubbing in the dirt making a few small amendments we imagine might be appreciated.
Personally, I tend to resent that approach and favour a movement aimed at making a screen-reader actually available to the sighted for nothing, so we can find out for ourselves what the true state of affairs is with our sites in the context of the blind. That's the real issue, the rest is merely a show of support for accessibility. Why on earth should we be working in the dark like this, going at a snail's pace? All this "revelation" on separators as read out is somewhat ridiculous, compared to that larger issue.
Tommy Olsson
Comment on November 18, 2004 at 2:19 pm
The catch is that it only makes sense in English. In Sweden, the name for this character is "commercial a", which wouldn't make much sense as a separator.
I'm not sure how various screen readers pronounce the @ sign. If I recall correctly, pwWebSpeak just ignores it. I believe JAWS can be configured to read or ignore punctuation characters, but I'm not sure if the @ sign is included.
Lars
Comment on November 19, 2004 at 8:32 pm
Joel, my thoughts exactly. Especially that:
There is a demo version of JAWS available for free download; not sure what kind of version that is or what terms apply though. There is of course also Lynx, the text browser, which gives some idea of how the page structure and the links work from an accessibility point of view. But that is enough. JAWS is based on Internet Explorer, and Lynx is still a visual browser without the interpretation rules and functionality of screen reader software. The move you describe would indeed provide for a much better alternative. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any such efforts being made. Perhaps someone else has?
Tommy, thanks. The only additional catch I can think of is that there is a slight risk that people will be unable to distinguish at the separator from at the preposition. But that is a minor objection. We obviously need a separator death match.
Blair Millen
Comment on November 20, 2004 at 1:37 pm
I've been using this FREE screen reader for a wee while and find it very useful to experience how a blind user would navigate around a website.
Lars
Comment on November 22, 2004 at 11:47 am
Thanks Blair, will check it out! Hopefully it's a smaller download than the 34MB JAWS demo, or the 45MB trial of IBM Home Page Reader.
Eoin
Comment on May 12, 2005 at 3:21 pm
I wanted to put some sort of arrow in. There are symbols about the that look like arrows but would they be pronounced that way?
On http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html I found amp;rarr; →
Will JAWS or other screen reader pronounce this 'right arrow'?