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Re: Interactive Glossary

for

From: Ken M
Date: Jul 8, 2010 8:42AM

<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> Ken M wrote:
>
>> If you look at this page, http://define.com, each word on the page is clickable with a hyperlink, even though there are no links in the text.
>
> Ken, I assume you are only creating the links for every single word as a proof of concept, and would never do it in reality, right? Because wow, that page is painful in a screenreader.

Deborah,

I need to obtain a screen reader so I can appreciate what you're
experiencing.

This was just sort of an easy way to make reading the dictionary fun for
people who love to just explore definitions. I'm one of those people.

To make the page less painful there could be some text at the very
beginning of the page that gives an option to turn off the universal
hyperlinks so it's not so painful for people with screen readers. I
could set a cookie on the client so that it only has to be set once,
then it remembers.

Of course, the website is a dictionary, so that's a very unique
circumstance. Most people wouldn't be doing this with every word.
However, it does offer the opportunity to automate to a certain degree.
For example, if you had a large glossary of thousands of terms you
could have only those words be highlighted...I've seen that done on
websites.

But the javascript still would work if you only want to put certain
blocks of text in an element with a "hypertext" id.

By the way, that little script is still pretty rough. I'm just figuring
out regular expressions myself. I paid a programmer to create this for
me about 5 years ago before I knew javascript or css. Now that I know a
little, I can see that I'm not fully taking advantage of the power of
regular expressions.



> -Deborah
>