Making Citations Accessible

Question

Years ago I had to fight to preserve citation styles - especially fighting inline citation. Because I honestly believe Inline citation is ugly and throws off my reading experience.

Now, Citations in the style I used then were generated by Text<sup>Source p.##</sup> for
Text^{Source p.##}

That could result in problematic rendering on screen readers. For example, some just strip supertext formatting and render it
TextSource p.##.

At times I fixed that by adding a space before the supertext. Better... but not nice sill: I was told other users have problems reading more than a few characters of supertext.

---

As a result, I have asked on Meta if the stack could offer us a method that makes formatting references easier.

In the meantime, I am working on manually formatting my citations using Supertext for just numerals and a list of sources in the end - which technically is where I had adapted my citation style from. The example would look like this:

Text ¹

---

1. _{Source p.##}

Are there problems with the new and improved citation style that botch accessibility?

After a test, using Wikipedia style [1] for the supertext can turn the source-number into a link, like seen with this: 1

(1) doesn't do this so might be the better adjustment if needed, unless a link is wanted

Answer 1

The most accessible way to format citations that is, well, accessible to us, is probably to include them parenthetically (or with brackets or what have you). As you have found, whether you make them superscript or not makes no difference.

As for footnotes, there is no way to make superscript numbers jump to the appropriate footnote and back as you would have on Wikipedia. We cannot create anchors in our text, which is what you would use to enable that kind of jumping—in short, the browser doesn’t recognize the footnote as a “thing” that you can jump to, and no URL will do so.

Ultimately, parentheses or brackets or whatever don’t do a whole lot of good. Purely-visual formatting, like super- or sub- scripts, does less, as you have found. Manual footnotes done by including a superscript number in the text and including an ordered list at the end is even worse, because in the text it’s just going to read the number and then later on—potentially much later on—it’s going to introduce a list and the numbered items will be read. And there is zero we can do about that.

Frankly, even if we had complete control of the page’s markup, we still probably couldn’t do a great job—the state of the art in this respect is fairly poor. HTML provides a <cite> tag which can be used to indicate that something is a citation, but doesn’t really provide anything to apply to the superscript number to say that it is an indicator that a given citation is relevant. But we would have that, and we could have links back and forth. So it would be better. But not great.

The only realistic solution here is for Stack Exchange to install some extension to their Markdown processor to handle footnotes and/or citations. My guess is that this request would not receive high priority—most Stack Exchange sites aren’t especially concerned with citation. But if you are interested in pursuing this, MSE would be the place to do it.