RE: Deleted text & Strike-through

> Lynx renders this as
> This is the [del:old text:del][ins:new text:ins].

Lynx's approach seems very reasonable -- I'm discouraged that HPR and
JAWS aren't doing nearly as well... 

> Just in passing, because underlines have traditionally 
> been used in the Web to indicate links, it is not a really 
> good idea to use them for other things.

I was a little surprised to see that IE 6, Netscape 6.2, and Opera 6 all
rendered inserted (<ins>) text with an underline by default.


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 2:38 PM
To: Jon Hanna
Cc: 'wai-ig list'
Subject: RE: Deleted text & Strike-through

Lynx renders this as

  This is the [del:old text:del][ins:new text:ins].

It's one option equivalent in fact to the CSS rules

 del:before { content: '[del:' }
 del:after  { content: ':del]' }
 ins:before { content: '[ins:' }
 ins:after  { content: ':ins]' }

Another option would be available if screen readers ever implement Audio
CSS properties and a user stylesheet (well, emacspeak does, but it seems
others are not approaching very rapidly), allowing users to define audio
styling rules that are useful to them (tone or volume change, generated
content before and after as above, voice change, etc)

for completeness, the implied CSS rules Jon mentioned:

  del { display:none }

which I have used before on the user side, or

  del { text-decoration: strike }
  ins { text-decoration: underline }

as in the original post. Just in passing, becuase underlines have
traditionally been used in the Web to indicate links, it is not a really
good idea to use them for other things. It is noramlly unnecesary given
the range of styling options, and confuses users. In general I style ins
elements with colour (works for me!) and a text change such as
italicise. (Amaya does this for me by default)

cheers

Charles

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Jon Hanna wrote:

  > 	<p>This is the <del>old text</del> <ins>new text</ins>.</p>
  >
  > The words "old text" would be formatted as strike through, and "new
  > text" would be underlined.
  [snip]
  > (2) Do we have any guidelines on how a screen reader SHOULD
  > identify such text?

  Surely that would depend on why the document was being read. You say
  that <del> text should be struck through, but it would be just as
  sensible not to display it at all if the reader only wanted to read
  the document in its current state.

  Similarly one way a screen reader could validly render such text is
  to ignore it, another would be to insert content so it would be come:

  This is the, used to be; old text, changed to; new text.


  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  gpg: Warning: using insecure memory!
  gpg: Signature made Mon Dec 10 12:24:43 2001 EST using DSA key ID
F532BD18
  gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
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-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61
409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1
617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,
France)

Received on Monday, 10 December 2001 17:57:26 UTC