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Re: Using CSS to hide a portion of the link text

for

From: Dan Conley
Date: Aug 3, 2009 12:30PM

I guess it's reverse discrimination, but only if you're saying that all
people need to have access to all things at all times. My site has a
French translation, but users in the English section can't read the
French text because they have no reason to (switching between languages
is done through a link on every page, so they can if they really want to).

Maybe we're talking about different things, though. If I use this method
-- and I'm really thinking I will -- it won't be to abbreviate links or
provide more complete descriptions for screen readers. It will be, as
Donald says, to provide explanation that may not be needed otherwise.
Right now the table of contents on my site has let's say 25 instances of
a link with the text PDF. In context, that's fine, but in a list of
links on a page it's entirely useless. As I understand it, screen
readers aren't consistent in using the link title vs link text, so I
make them the same.

I haven't been able to think of a way to give each article's PDF link a
distinct title without duplicating the text immediately preceding it, so
until now I've sort of pretended the problem didn't exist. If there's
another way to handle it (and abbreviating the title text isn't an
option, since it's grabbed from a database and can be in three
languages, two of which I'm not fluent in) then I'm willing to hear it,
but it seems like hiding longer text would be a good option.

Dan Conley
Information Specialist
Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information and
Exchange (CIRRIE)
University at Buffalo, Health Sciences Library B6
Phone: (716) 829-3900 x145
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://cirrie.buffalo.edu

Geof Collis wrote:
> Ok, the more I think about this the less I understand.
>
> If I'm hiding something that only screen readers can see/hear isn't
> that reverse discrimination because sighted people wont be able to read it?
>
>
> At 09:31 AM 8/3/2009, you wrote:
>>> Geof Collis < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>>> These ideas sound good in principle but what happens if someone wants
>>> to print off the page and take it to a presentation where the link
>>> url is necessary.
>>>
>> You shouldn't use URLs as link text to begin with (and none of these
>> examples do). If you want them to be printable then you can do this using a
>> good print CSS although IEs support for that is somewhat lacking.
>>