- From: Phill Jenkins <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:03:52 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
As far as I know, screen readers no longer look at screen positioning, but the order in the source and/or "Document Object Model" (DOM). Older screen readers use to use an off screen model where they actually hooked the graphics system and determined the text on the screen by watching the text being sent to the display and building a model of what was on the screen so that it could be spoken or brailled. So a good question to ask the screen reader developers is whether absolute positioning changes the reading order. For IBM Home Page Reader it does not. Since one of the 508 and WCAG requirements is that the page still work when style sheets are turned off, it would seem to me that using style sheets (CSS) alone to convey the order of information is not compliant with the guidelines. Regards, Phill Jenkins, IBM Accessibility Services http://www.ibm.com/able
Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2004 09:03:56 UTC