RE: QUESTION: use of JavaScript to comply with Sect 508

David, either I completely don't understand your answer, or you didn't
understand my question. I assume the former, but in case it is the latter, I
will ask again.

The Microsoft site has menus that appear as a result of JavaScript and
mouseovers. The JavaScript code for the "local" menus, for example, is in
http://www.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/en-us/localHP9.js.
The text of those menu items appears in the IE5 document model so the links
are available to screen readers and Home Page Reader.

QUESTION: Under what circumstances do such links appear in the (Microsoft
IE5) object model when they are not visible, and have not been visible?

Jim
jim@jimthatcher.com
Accessibility Consulting
http://jimthatcher.com
512-306-0931

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of David Woolley
Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2001 11:03 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: QUESTION: use of JavaScript to comply with Sect 508


> David, do you know what are the circumstances under which such items that
> would be rendered via JavaScript appear in the DOM even though they have
not
> been rendered visually?

The wrong way of doing this is to initialise their absolute position to be
off the screen.  A better way is to give them a CSS attribute (display?)
to make them invisible.

NB  You are not really talking about the web in general here, but really
about users of recent versions of Internet Explorer.  These effects almost
certainly rely on the Microsoft proprietory document object model, or they
dynamically detect IE and Netscape (and the rest just have to reverse
engineer
and emulate one of these).

(A lot of the off topic questions on the www-html list are essentially
people confusing browser object model scripting with HTML and expecting that
it is in some way standardised across browsers.  Object models are popularly
known as Javascript and Javascript is popularly known as HTML.)

Note the only part of Microsoft for which I permit JS by default is the
software updates site (an essential part of the site for anyone using
JS - you should ideally check it daily as the hackers will!)  I generally
only notice Javascript when it doesn't fall back cleanly.

Received on Sunday, 7 January 2001 18:28:18 UTC