Re: Fw: putting reader text in hidden <div> tags / adding pauses

On Tue, 2001-12-04 at 00:07, Jim Thatcher wrote:
>But the main job is to present the
>material that can be seen. Things with visibility:hidden or display:none
>can't be seen and are intended by the web designer to not be seen or heard.

Hmmm. My own usage of "display: none" is to show content in Netscape
4.x, and similarly broken browsers, that is irrelevant, but harmless, in
well designed browsers. That is, the failure mode I'm designing for is
that "When in doubt: Show It!". My impression of other uses of this is
that that is a common failure mode to design for; including that the
assumption seems to be that it's safer to hide content after the fact
with JavaScript -- as opposed to generating it with JS in the first
place -- as it will then be available when JS is disabled.

The relevance to a screen reader is simply that while the use of
"display: none" is ambigous, the intended failure mode is probably that
the content be shown in user agents that does not understand CSS. IOW, a
screen reader style user agent may get the best results by ignoring
"display: none".


OTOH, I'm basing this on "gut feeling" and a few wild assumptions so
apply liberal grains of salt... :-)

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2001 18:31:09 UTC