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Re: Are Tag Clouds Accessible

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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Apr 27, 2007 2:20PM

<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We've been talking about using Tag Clouds in some of our work (here's an example: http://del.icio.us/tag/). We've been seeing a lot more tag clouds recently, and I wonder how it's possible for them to be accessible, especially in a screen reader. How could you go about differentiating such a list of links? Are header tags appropriate(I wouldn't think so)? I already know that del.icio.us conveys meaning in color, which is a no-no.
>
> Has anyone tried to make accessible tag clouds before, or is it just not possible?

This article on 24ways may be of interest:
http://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud

Personally, I did a little experiment recently with marking up a tag
cloud as a table and then heavily styling that table to then appear as
an inline list with different class assignment for the size of each
link...so in markup, the actual value (number of entries with that tag)
would be explicitly present, but visually it'd still be presented in the
familiar size relationship. All was going well, until I tried to get it
to play nice in IE. Even in IE7, it just doesn't seem to be possible to
get a table to display as anything other than a table - despite oodles
of display:inline (on the table itself, the thead, the tbody, the
individuals rows and even the individual cells themselves), IE still
wants to show it as a table...only way around seems to be absolute
positioning, which would not work well for obvious reasons. *sigh*

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke