Re: Thorny one - representing greek letters and formulae in an english page

Steve writes:
> One of our accessibility-course delegates has come up with something 
> that has me stumped at this stage:  they want to represent greek letters 
> on their page.

Why? To what end? That is the question you always need to start with.
What is the purpose of these greek letters?

> They currently use <FONT> to switch to the symbol font 
> to do this, and another delegate argues for Gifs with ALT text.  My 
> views are:
> 1) Font tags
> Are wrong.

They may be wrong, but why are they wrong? Would it be just as wrong
to use <span> and CSS to set the font?

> 2) gifs with ALT text:
> Do not scale, but better for screen readers and older browsers

What ALT text would you use for the greek letters?

> 3) use a <SPAN> with locale change to greek
> don't know if this would work, possibly more correct.  not sure about 
> how most browsers will receive it.

Locale change? Do you mean language change?

> 4) Character entities :
> Probably purest way, probably inaccessible to screen readers and older 
> browsers

Do you only have to do it one way?

> Does anybody have a view on this? or any decent resources I can review?
> Regards,
> Steve

Steve, out of curiousity -- you say <font> tags are wrong but your email was
full of <font>. Is there a reason?

--Kynn

Received on Friday, 8 February 2002 14:39:11 UTC