RE: speech only links

Seth Rothberg wrote:

> I've no idea where the archives are kept.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/
(And the WAI IG home page is http://www.w3.org/WAI/IG/ )

> I've been trying to come up with a more elegant way of 
> presenting screen reader only links than using the anchored1px
> transparent gif with alt text trick, which works but strikes me
> as an ugly hack. 

I think we all share that feeling, and we've discussed some technical
drawbacks too, e.g., the alt text is real text to several search engines.

But there's hardly anything essentially better that we could do, except
complete reorganization (put navigation onto a separate page, and you'll
need just one navigational link; or put navigation at the bottom of the
page, optionally with a link to it at the start of a page).

> However, I'm wondering if overiding like so,
> 
> @media aural { .speechlinks { display: block; } }
> 
> would be effective and proper.

I'm afraid we can't realistically expect that to work now or in the near
future. Even if we got modern user agents that actually implement aural
style sheets, there would be lots of people still using older software -
including even arrangements like Lynx plus a speech synthesizer that uses
Lynx output as its input.

-- 
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehittämiskeskus ry
Finnish Information Society Development Centre 
Salomonkatu 17 A, 10th floor, FIN - 00100 HELSINKI, FINLAND
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399 
http://www.tieke.fi  jukka.korpela@tieke.fi

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 02:50:55 UTC