How long is a quote?
I’ve been trying out InFocus from SSB recently. There’s no doubt that it is a very powerful accessibility and flexible validator that can be configured to taste. One of the configuration options allows you set set a maximum number of words that should allowed in an inline quote (default: 10 words) whilst another allows to pre-set the minimum number of words allowed within a <blockquote> (default: 10 words).
Now whilst I appreciate that any decent, mechnical, accessibility assessment requires a number of manual checks and that judgement calls may have to be made on a case-to-case basis, this did raise the question in my mind as to exactly how you define when to use q and when to use blockquote? For a start, I think that using a basic word count would be a gross over-simplifcation as a great deal depends upon the context of a given quote within the text. Something along the lines of:
I was extremely happy with the service, said Bob
would seem to be a pretty obvious case for using q as a way of indicating where a quotation started and stopped within a given line. However, I see obviously longer, inline, quotes in press releases and newspaper articles all of the time and, when managing the PR section of a client’s site, it’s highly likely that you’ll be expected to publish the corporate press release of the day at any time. A recent example was:
"The level of entries was exceptionally
high, which supports the commitment and progress being made in these
areas", she said.
An obvious inline quote, to my mind, but one that greatly exceeds the defaults mentioned above and not one that I would be happy trying to use blockquote with. The context would be completely wrong.
I ran a few tests just to see just how big a chunk of text would need to be before I automatically thought of it as blockquote material. I wasn’t suprised to see that it was around 40 words or more. To my mind, that’s what the ‘block’ part means - big chunk.