Re: Screen readers and <<, <, >, >> characters

Actually this is a big deal.  Depending on the punctuation setting you
have, the screen reader may not say anything for these punctuation
characters.

If you are using these on links, there's a way to get JAWS to read the
title text in some navigation modes.  If they are on input elements,
Window-Eyes will read the title text.

However with the current state of assistive technology, I believe the
solution that's going to give you the widest support from many different
products is to either use more descriptive text in the first place, or
turn the controls into images and then use the expanded text (next page)
as the alt tag.




On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Martha Wilkes wrote:

> Apologies if this has been covered, but I couldn't find it in the archives.
>
> Some of our web applications use the following characters as navigation links for large tables (or as button labels, depending on the application). I'm sure you're all familiar with them:
>
> "<<" means go back to the first page
> "<" means go back to the previous page
> ">" means go to the next page
> ">>" means go to the last page
>
> The screen readers we have tested with (IBM Home Page, JAWS) read these characters as "greater than" and "less than" (as they should, since this is what these characters really mean). Now this might not be a big deal if vision-impaired users are already accustomed to hearing "greater than" and knowing that it means "go to the previous page". Does anyone know if this is the case?
>
> We put more descriptive information in the <title> tag, but the screen readers don't seem to read that info at all.
>
> TIA for any insight you can provide.
>
> martha.wilkes@sas.com | 919.531.1416
>

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2001 10:30:59 UTC