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Re: Question for screen reader users

for

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Dec 15, 2009 10:57AM

Your question made me curious, so I created a very simple page to test it out. The page just contained a series of paragraph elements with various numbers of blank lines before, after, and inside the paragraph elements.

With JAWS 11 and both IE7 and FF3.5, JAWS announced a single blank line after each paragraph--no matter how many blank lines appeared in the html file. It, like the browsers, ignored any blank lines in the paragraph elements.

With NVDA 20009.1 and both IE7 and FF3.5, NVDA did not announce any of the blank lines that appeared in the html file.

That's not a thorough test, but it seems to match what I have observed in the past with at least JAWS and NVDA. Someone else may be able to test the other screen readers, browsers, or various versions of either.

You can get a screen reader to announce a blank line if you have an empty block element (like the paragraph element) or a br element or a series of blank lines in a pre element. However, if that is the case, I would suggest removing them. If the site/app is using those empty elements to attain a certain visual appearance, then I would second Keith's suggestion to use CSS to attain that appearance.

Thanks!
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Langum, Michael J
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 11:07 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] Question for screen reader users

We've been requested to remove all the carriage returns (that is, when you hit the Enter key to insert a blank line between paragraphs) because (they allege ) screen readers will say them aloud.

I've never heard of this. Can anyone confirm or deny?

-- Mike Langum
Asst. Webmaster, WWW.OPM.GOV
U.S. Office of Personnel Management