PAC 3 "Possibly inappropriate use of "quote" structure element.

[Choco_123]

Hi there, 

I ran my pdf through the PAC 3 accessibility checker, and everything is passing except for an error that says "Possibly inappropriate use of a "Quote" Structure. Does anyone know what the issue could be? At first I thought it was because I had a separate text box for the quote, and that's why i was getting an error message, but it's still happening when I placed the quote in an already existing text box. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Per the PDF/UA-1 standard, <Quote> is an inline text-level tag and doesn't encase an entire paragraph. It's usually nested inside a <P> tag.

But <BlockQuote> is a block-level tag for an entire paragraph.

Samples of the both:

<P> John said, <Quote>let's go to lunch</Quote> and the group headed to the cafe. </P> {The quote is within the sentence or paragraph.}

<P> During his speech to the US Congress, Ukranian President Zelensky said: </P>

<BlockQuote> {new paragraph} Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided, the destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy. </BlockQuote>

Switch your tag from <Quote> to <BlockQuote> and see if it passes.

[Choco_123]

Thank you so much Bevi!  I will definitely try that and report back 🙂

[Hilda30726505b9sh]

Will the same structure apply (with blockquote) if the paragraph starts with a quote, followed by a <p> and continuation of a quote? 

Sample:

<BlockQuote> {new paragraph} Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided, the destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy </BlockQuote>

<P> said Ukranian President Zelensky. </P>

<BlockQuote>This is a fight for democracy...</BlockQuote>

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

<BlockQuote> requires that the entire paragraph be the quote.

So in your sample would create 2 paragraphs: one with <BlockQuote> and the other with <P>. Gramatically, that's incorrect: there's no punctuation after "democracy" and "said" begins with a lowercase letter — and it's a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence.

Standards and guidelines require that any element can't be broken into 2 or more elements. Your sample takes a paragraph and breaks it into 3 separate block-level tags, and therefore violates the standard.

Instead, rewrite your sample to use <Quote> within a <P>:

{one new paragraph} <P><Quote> Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided, the destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy </Quote> said Ukranian President Zelensky. <Quote>This is a fight for democracy...</Quote></P>

<BlockQuote> = the entire paragraph is the quoted material. It is a paragraph-level tag (aka, block-level tag in techno-ese). It stands on its own and is not embedded inside a <P> tag. It's used instead of a <P>.

<Quote> = only a portion of a paragraph is a quote. It is a character-level tag. Only the selected characters are tagged with it, not the entire paragraph, and it's nested inside a regular <P> tag.

[Hilda30726505b9sh]

Bevi - The element not breaking into 2 or more elements standard is really helpful. I wasn't familiar, so I appreciate your response and guidance on this.

Thank you!

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

@Hilda30726505b9sh, you're welcome.

Here are 2 common examples where that requirement are violated.

1. A long heading wraps down to 2 lines of text. The author wants to control where the line break appears and puts in an enter key at the end of the first line, which causes 2  paragraphs to appear, each segment tagged <H1>.

<H1>This is my

<H1>Long Heading

Which is confusing to those using screen readers!

Another example is a hard return (paragraph marker) in the middle of a paragraph.

Example:

<P>Right now, the destiny of our country is being

<P>decided.

Essentially, any of the block-level elements in the PDF/UA-1 tag set must be one element, not artifically divided into two or more. See https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_05-02_tags/pdf-ua-tags.shtml