WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Well formed verses Valid code

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Feb 26, 2007 2:00PM

> the two screen readers that are referenced in
> this post don't parse the HTML themselves - they use MSAA or
> the DOM to get their interpretation of the content.

I believe older versions of JAWs parsed the HTML independently of the
browser, something that has changed since version 7.1.

Wouldn't there be a potential for different processing by the screen
readers compared to the browsers? Especially for non-valid or not well
formed markup.

Ian Hickson produced a tool to evaluate the DOM trees (probably
available from here but I can't access it right now:
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/html/parsing/compat/viewer.html)

I'm not sure whether that would work for checking screen readers, but it
might be necessary to use something like that to test for differences.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience

Nomensa Email Disclaimer:
http://www.nomensa.com/email-disclaimer.html