On Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:46:45 +0100, Paul Waring <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 17/03/2008, Nicholas C. Zakas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I know the topic has come up a few times, but I'm still wondering if
HTML 5
should provide some sort of logic around content that should not be
displayed by browsers but should be read by screen readers. Perhaps a
"noview" boolean attribute on each element could be used to tell UAs
not to
render the content but to report it to screen readers? Or maybe a
<noview/>
element could be used to surround content that shouldn't be displayed
but
should be accessible to screen readers?
Is there an example of something which you think should be seen by
screen readers but not by sighted users? Also, isn't this doing
something similar to what display : none does in CSS (browsers won't
render this content, but I presume screen readers will still read it
out)?
Bad assumption - they don't read it out. They read what is put on the
screen. (Well, sort of - what they actually do is parse the DOM themselves
quite often, as well). One reason for this is that a lot of authors put
stuff there "for screen reader users" that just adds to the clutter on
their page - an easy mistake if you're not used to what screen readers are
actually like to work with.
Designers put things (including useful things) on pages for screen reader
users, and then hide them in various ways - things like [D] links, the
"skip to content" links, alternatives for images that are more than just a
text string so can't go in as alt, etc. I don't like the use case, but it
is pretty common and if you want to be compatible with the real web we
should have a way to deal with it. At the moment the most commonly
successful technique is positioning things offscreen, but that's not a
great solution either.
In my ideal world, people would actually implement the aural style, but I
think we are the biggest implementation of that and we only do it on
windows for the voice plugin :(
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com
