Re: question about the draft:

On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:59:08 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Brian Smith wrote:
>> Ian Hickson wrote:

>> > I can have a script or something insert asterisks before each issue if
>> > that would help, and then have the style sheet hide them for
>> > CSS-enabled users. Would that work? Or would making the asterisks
>> > disappear from the screen rendering affect the speech output?

>> How about prefixing them these notes with a white-on-red "TODO:" (using
>> something like display: run-in)? I think that would solve the
>> accessibility issues pretty easily, and it would even clarify things for
>> people without vision issues.
>
> It's pretty obvious in context what these issues are. The only problem is
> determining where they start and end. The asterisks should be an
> acceptable solution for this, no?

A textual run-in is a somewhat better idea because a common pattern for  
screen reader users is to reduce or eliminate the pronunciation of  
punctuation to improve efficiency. If the end of the issue is clear from  
the context, that should be enough. Of course it is important that the  
information is rendered to the screen reader - and since ost screen  
readers still use IE that means you can't simply add a stylesheet that  
uses generated content.

It's also helpful for things like searching for the key text (personally I  
use @@issue: as a marker for this) and for really quick recognition - a  
single asterisk is not as rapidly picked out as a bigger marker, although  
the border/colour distinction is also a pretty good visual clue once I get  
to that part of the page.

(as an aside Ian opined...)
>> > I wish screen readers supported "@media speech" and CSS.

me too. Actually, Opera does in Windows with the voice extension, but  
that's far from a complete solution. One of the problems is suporting it  
in a way that screenreaders will actually read it - they are generally not  
so helpful in the regard...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals   Try Opera 9.5: http://www.opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 17:58:11 UTC