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RE: Printable character between adjacent links

for

From: Terence de Giere
Date: May 17, 2002 7:53AM

Image based links, such as a set of graphic navigation buttons, are
still regular links, the image is inside the link, but in the code the
links are still adjacent with no printable character to separate them.
Some combinations of screen readers and browsers ingnore images, unless
the images are turned off and the alternate text prints to the screeen.
But the alternate text is within the links, not between them, and thus
for legacy technology, the separator character is required, otherwise
the links will be concatenated.

With the SPAN element, one can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to mask
the separator character, by making it the same color as the background
so it will not visually show (but still will print to the screen) in
graphical browsers that support CSS, and this can be useful for a row of
image navigation buttons.

Note that the requirement for a separator character that prints to the
screen is a priority three item on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
scale, and so is not needed to comply with Section 508 rules or Level A
or Level Double-A on the W3C guidelines scale. The Bobby 3.2
accessibility testing tool mistakenly lists the separator character as a
Level Double-A (priority two) requirement - the new version of Bobby,
Bobby WorldWide, fixes this.

Professor Combs doesn't like these separator characters probably because
he doen't need them with his technology; most people don't need them
now. Since the characters are read out, they break the flow of listening
to the page, in other words, for most users listening to a page or using
Braille, they present a small usability barrier, and slow down the
reading of a page.

Although not necessary for visual users, for visual presentation, they
often can make a line of links more easily scanned by the eye. Visual
scanning is not necessarily linear and a user can easily skip over or
ignore material. Audio or Braille is linear output, and skipping that
corresponds to visual scanning is not possible, not withstanding that
some technology allows users to skip between headings, or skip tables, etc.

Thus we have pluses and minuses for the use of separator characters
between adjacent links depending on the user group, with visual users
and legacy screenreader users benefiting the most, and audio browser
users and users of recent screenreaders benefitting the least, if at all.

Terence de Giere
<EMAIL REMOVED>


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