Re: Skip Nav (was RE: "Think EUO, not SEO"/Google)

Screen readers are not aural devices.  The provide a means where by one
should be able to opperate in their respective environment as long as the
information and interactivity does not have to be "seen".

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
To: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@sidar.org>
Cc: "Mike Rundle" <phark@phark.net>; "W3c-Wai-Ig" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 7:28 PM
Subject: Re: Skip Nav (was RE: "Think EUO, not SEO"/Google)




On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 07:41 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> As Bill said, this causes a problem for screen readers.

This is a problem with screenreaders.  :)  Really, the CSS specification
is pretty clear in allowing a user to specify style rules as being only
for screen display, or as being intended for aural display.

If an aural device chooses to ignore "aural" media type rules, and
instead
honor "screen" media type rules, that's honestly not the fault of the
Web
developer who is following the spec.

There are serious problems with compromising standards-compliant
practices
in order to account for broken implementations of the standard.  If a
screenreader user is complaining about only seeing what is on the
screen, and not hearing the "aural" content, that's something she should
take up with her screenreader developer.

(That's not to say that you couldn't, for example, generate a specific
screenreader Web interface in order to compensate for the broken
screenreader,
just as you can do this with other broken software if you choose.  But
really,
you shouldn't be defacing Web designs because screenreaders want to act
like
"screen" media instead of "aural" media.)

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
Shock & Awe Blog                           http://blog.kynn.com/shock

Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 19:35:10 UTC