Jon Dawson wrote:
1) Screen Readers
Is it wrong to have the link and description together? I mean, with a
screen reader if you were going to base your decision on whether to go
to the link on the description then you'd have to select the link before
it finished reading it out. (Know what I mean?) I can imagine the
thought process would be like this, "Ok, this is a link to the Leet
Universitys Online Leet Quiz. I think I'd like to take that quiz. But
now I have to back pedal because we've moved on to the next link."
Your reservations seem to be based on the erroneous assumption that a
screen reader user gets to a page and just sits there passively,
listening to the whole page being read out top to bottom, finger poised
over the enter key in order to activate a link. This, luckily, is not
how a screen reader user works: it's an interactive process. The user
will speed through the page, speed up the reading, slow it down, skip to
the next/previous paragraph, get an overview of the page headings, tab
from link to link, call up a list of all links on the page, etc.
So, they're most likely to have tabbed to your link, or seeing the link
in the link list...in which case it makes perfect sense to have good
descriptive link titles that include a bit of description of where the
link would take the user. And yes, if they *were* just listening
passively, they could still hit shift+tab to get to the link very
quickly, which is not a problem and part of their normal way of working.
2) Screen Readers
>From memory a screen reader reads out the url when it starts on a new
page anyway so I'd imagine that constantly listening to full url's would
become tedious.
It's also, in the majority of cases, completely incomprehensible and bad
for usability. As a screen reader user I wouldn't want to hear "H T T P
colon slash slash W W W dot ..." etc
3) Screen Readers
The software has an option for displaying all links. Wouldn't a long
list of links starting with http:// defeat the purpose compared with
having meaninggul links such as "Leet Universitys - Online Leet Quiz".
Exactly.
4) Printing
Yes, you wouldnt get the url on paper. Maybe some CSS can solve this one.
Way back in 2002 Eric Meyer already touched on this. See the "Printed
links" section under http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/
--
Patrick H. Lauke
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