Re: Can User Agents adopt the lists that screen readers so eleqently do?

On 29 Mar 2004, at 15:36, Steven Dale wrote:

> Actually, I wonder if User Agents could offer a list of links/headings
> with the capability of setting the focus to a selected link/header in 
> the
> list? Similar to screen readers but in a side window?

Sure they can. Amaya, Opera, iCab, and perhaps others do this already, 
and have done for years. There is one browser in wide use that happens 
to be pretty poor in this respect. Even with IE I believe it would be 
possible to write a client-side XSLT (IE does implement XSLT to some 
extent) that would give anchors to all headers - at least they would 
appear in the general navigation. A bit more work and you could include 
a scriptlet that navigated between them - or use Jon's existing tools 
to do so.

> This would aleviate
> the need for designers to code skip links or even some menus and just 
> (or
> almost) mark up the page with content, headings, and links to other 
> pages.

>  Images would be under content in this scenerio ( I am not mentioning
> about changing this part ) But, what about adding a capability to list
> images/figures too?  As in a printed document with a table of figures.

Again, this can be done. Although I am less clear on the use case...

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 02:57:54 UTC