[#256] CSS to hide Client Side Image Maps?

Open issue #256 [1] on our issues list addresses the use of CSS to hide
links for client-side image maps.

The issue (raised by: Cynthia Shelley - 17 August 2000 [2]) poses the
following questions:

[snip]
... text equivalents for client side image maps.  
A possible technique: can you hide the extra links with CSS, and provide an
accessibility style sheet that unhides them?  Is there a good way to allow
user-selected stylesheets on a per-site basis?  This could be a very
powerful way to enable accessibility features for those who need them,
without changing the UI/Prettiness experience for those who don't.
[end snip]

At the May 21 Techniques meeting, we discussed these questions and concluded
that this technique is problematic because screen readers may or may not
read content that is hidden by CSS. As well, it is not clear that those
users who need the content displayed by the alternate style sheet would be
able to reliably uncover it. 

While there are a number of questions surrounding the viability of
techniques like this that have yet to be addressed in the techniques work, I
propose that we close this particular issue, taking no action regarding the
explicit inclusion of this technique in our techniques documents. 

-Ben

[1] http://trace.wisc.edu/bugzilla_wcag/show_bug.cgi?id=256 
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2000JulSep/0255.html 

--
Ben Caldwell | caldwell@trace.wisc.edu
Trace Research and Development Center (http://trace.wisc.edu)

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2003 14:20:39 UTC