Re: <span> within a word any issue for screen readers?

Geoff Deering wrote:

> Yes, I agree.  The accesskey is assigned to the A element, the SPAN is 
> just serving as a non structural element as a visual indicator that 
> there is an accesskey assigned to that link.  It's following the GUI  
> standards of assigning accelerator keys to menuing functions.

Is this not something that should be left up the user agent to 
implement, with its own algorhythm of "if there is an accesskey, go 
through the link text (if any), find the first occurrence of the letter 
matching the  accesskey defined, and visually (and structurally, 
aurally, etc) distinguish it from the rest of the text" (even based on 
user settings, where a user can choose whether or not she wants that 
kind of highlighting)? Incidentally, this is what happens in XUL: you 
define the accesskey as an attribute, and the platform itself takes care 
of the visual underlining).

I fear that advocating use of span to underline accesskeys is moving us 
back towards using markup for presentation.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
__________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
__________________________________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
__________________________________________________________

Received on Monday, 9 January 2006 21:07:08 UTC