Re: Accessibility barrier?

At 9:01 AM -0500 7/13/00, Melinda Morris-Black wrote:
>We are currently assembling technical requirements for our website
>redesign. One of my goals to move to a XHTML 1.0 and stylesheet solution
>for greater accessibility. I don't anticipate any difficulty for the
>majority of our portal, with one exception: We display bills for our
>state legislature which require strike through text. I'm required that
>these display properly, due to the legal nature of the content.
>
>This will be no problem for newer browsers that recognize stylesheets.
>However, strike through will not degrade gracefully.  I still have a
>population using older browsers and don't anticipate any significant
>upgrades in the near future. Many are dialing in from rural Kansas.
>
>Any suggestions for this conundrum? We may have to continue marking up
>those documents for years to come otherwise.

This is a tricky problem, because, of course, if you use CSS just for
the strikethrough, then when the page "degrades gracefully" on the
older browsers, that part of the information will get lost.

Here's what I suggest, although it's a bit of work.

Instead of this:

    <style type="text/css">
    <!--
      .struckout { text-decoration: line-through; }
    -->
    </style>
    ...
    This is the <span class="struckout">old</span> way to do it.

Try this:

    <style type="text/css">
    <!--
      .struckout { text-decoration: line-through; }
      .strucknote { display: none; }
    -->
    </style>
    ...
    This is the <span class="strucknote">Begin Strike</span><span
    class="struckout">newer</span><span class="strucknote">End
    Strike</span> way to do it.

It's not overly elegant -- it's hack -- but at the current time, hacks
are proving to be quite useful for the short term.

--Kynn
-- 
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Thursday, 13 July 2000 16:27:03 UTC