Hi, Early screen-readers were not very good at differentiating links and would run together the text of two adjacent links so it was necessary to use a "separator" character.
The vertical line (pipe) became the preferred character to separate adjacent links because, whilst it is quite verbose - the screen reader reads it as "vertical line" - this character is not used for very much else and so reduces any possible confusion with other text. (When I first started out in web design, I too thought this continual repetition of "vertical line" would be annoying but was assured by a screen-reader user that it was preferable to confusion otherwise). Thus, this separator was not merely a visual cue but vital for separating links from each other. That said, modern screen-readers are much better at differentiating between links and so screen-reader user's need this device much less. Additionally, improvements in CSS have led to best practice in web design increasingly placing navigation menus in lists. On Sat, September 27, 2008 3:24 pm, Daisy Morgan wrote: > Hello all > > I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this via Google - is it best > practice to use something like the pipe character ( | ) to separate links > in > a menu so that screenreader software pauses between the list items? Any > recommended articles dealing with accessible menus in general? > > Daisy > > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* > > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
