On Mar 31, 2008, at 08:10, Nicholas C. Zakas wrote:
@irrelevant is virtually indistinguishable from setting content to display: none. My point in bringing up accessibility with a possible attribute or element is to figure out where the lines between HTML and CSS are, as it appears HTML 5 has muddied the water. As I stated earlier on this list, if something is truly "irrelevant", then it's not included in the page. Something that's on the page and hidden is relevant, just perhaps not at the current time, which led to the suggestion on this list to rename the attribute "ignore".
I agree that the semantic fig leaf is confusing. It means "hidden" (from all interaction modes).
I understand your point about superfluity being defined by the presentation (one could argue the same about relevance...). Aural CSS seemed, at one point, like it would make sense for handling such issues. However, since screen readers read the "screen" media styles, it doesn't really help.
More to the point, it is unreasonable to expect casual authors to supply sensible aural CSS even if it were supported.
I still feel like it's a good idea to have an optional attribute on each element that indicates the element's content should not be ignored by screen readers regardless of the style applied. Perhaps this could be better handled by an ARIA role...
As currently drafted, ARIA has aria-hidden, which is essentially a less elegant duplicate of HTML5 'irrelevant'. As far as I can tell, ARIA doesn't specify aria-hidden=false as overriding display: none; in accessibility API exposure. (But then in general, ARIA doesn't specify processing requirements in the way we expect from HTML5.)
-- Henri Sivonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
