Interactive elements & screen readers, plus Amazon

Hi all,

I've got a couple of questions regarding the use of some dhtml and how this works with a screen reader, if anyone has comments or any other info they could pass on to me about this, it would be greatly appreciated.

I haven't posted to the list for a while, so I don't know if people are still asking these sorts of questions - please forgive me if I am falling outside the current list ettiquette! 

OK, so I have somebody wanting to do something a bit like the wee feature on amazon.com, where if you mouseover the link "See all 40 product categories" a bit of javascript is triggered and a block showing some info is displayed.

The implementation on amazon looks fairly nasty and they have got a link up near the top of the source code to a stripped down "screen reader friendly" version of the site at http://www.amazon.com/access

I'm wondering if people do use that cut down version of the site, or if screen reader users just use the regular main site?

Back to the way I would be looking at implementing the feature. This is similar to something which I've done in the past, but I had a couple of questions about the details.

I have no test page yet, but we would have a regular HTML page with a link to say "Subscribe to updates" - when the user hovers on the link, a form would be displayed below. The form would be in the HTML source on page load, hidden using CSS. 

My questions on this are:

1. If we displayed the content on focus as well as on hover, would this make it screen reader usable?

2. Alternatively, we could make clicking on the link (rather than, or as well as on focus) display the content and take you to it (ie use an anchor on the page).

2. Does reading out the link give it focus?

3. If we had (at top of page, with the skip link) a facility to turn off the show/hide functionality, (using a cookie) would this be useful?

Regards,
Rebecca Cox


====================================

SIGNIFY LIMITED :: the logic behind

====================================

ph: +64 4 803-3211 | fax: +64 4 803-3241

mob: +64 021 510 212 | http://www.signify.co.nz P.O. Box 24-068, Manners St, Wellington 250A Wakefield St, Wellington

====================================

This communication, including any attachment, is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete/destroy this communication; you may not read and must not copy, send on or retain any part of this communication. Please do not disclose to any third party anything about this communication.

Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 00:04:17 UTC