- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2010 00:01:24 +0000
- To: Aurélien Levy <aurelien.levy@free.fr>
- Cc: "public-html-a11y@w3.org" <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Aurélien Levy <aurelien.levy@free.fr> wrote: > The html5 specs change the specification on authorised elements inside the a > element. > Now I can have full div with ul p table etc inside an a element. [snip] > I'm bit concerned about that because if screenreader keep there current > functioning it will read the whole content each time user access to the > link. The list of links panel will become unusable and there is a massive > risk of cognitive overload Since it is already possible, albeit not conforming, to include structural markup inside "a" elements, since there is no restriction on the length of link text generally, and since authors can achieve similar effects from a visual perspective using "span" elements, this appears to be a situation screen readers need to deal with regardless of what the specification happens to bless. In contexts where short link text would be preferred, one option would be for the screen reader to use the contents of elements acting as summaries or headings for the linkified content (such as the "h1" elements from the spec's example). From this perspective, allowing authors to use structural markup within "a" elements is actually preferable to the alternative of them using "span" elements. Another approach would be to truncate the link text, perhaps at the last word required to render it unique on the page. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 00:01:57 UTC