Is Microformat's date-value-pattern fully accessible?

Question

Has there been an announcement (outside microformats.org) that the value-class-pattern is fully accessible?

e.g. given <abbr class="value" title="2008-06-24">this Tuesday</abbr>, will a screen reader say "24 June 2008" or will it say "2008 dash 6 dash 24"?

History

Microformats came along, and were great, except that dates etc were stored in abbr tags:

<abbr class="dtstart" title="20070312T1700-06">
  March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time
</abbr>`

This lead to screen readers doing ridiculous things as noted in hAccessibility. Now that microformats.org have released the value-class-pattern it's a lot better.

But I'm left unable to find a declaration from WaSP (or another accessibility source not directly tied to microformats) that declaratively states that they are now accessible to screen readers etc.

Answer 1

There's nothing saying that screen readers can't be smart and guess what is a date, but in practice they aren't smart at all…

To solve that problem once for all HTML5 defines <time> element. However, it's probably not supported by any screen readers nor microformat parsers yet. You can easily test against Google's implementation.