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Re: Are Tag Clouds Accessible

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From: Philip Kiff
Date: Apr 27, 2007 2:50PM

Marissa wrote on 27 April 2007 16:00 EDT:
> We've been talking about using Tag Clouds in some of our work (here's
> an example: http://del.icio.us/tag/).[....] Has anyone tried to make
> accessible tag clouds before, or is it just not possible?

I haven't used tag clouds myself, but at a superficial glance, the
del.icio.us usage in your example seems accessible enough to me: they offer
the option of sorting the list alphabetically (default) or "by size". If
you sort the list of tags by size, then a non-visual user agent will be able
to extract the same information that is currently conveyed by size/colour to
other users. Perhaps the tag list should be marked up as a list, rather
than a series of anchor hrefs, but in general, the information provided by
the tag cloud is still available to non-visual and/or colour-blind users.

Phil.