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Re: Strikethrough Content with Screen Readers

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 19, 2010 9:57PM

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Randall Pope wrote:

> Using different tones to read the different prices, is no help for the
> people who cannot hear, mainly the deaf-blind people who depends solely on
> braille display to read the web pages.

A relatively easy and universally accessible system would be to simply
allow the user to specify whether they want content that has been
stricken to be read in a different pitch or intonation, or to have it
identified explicitly by reading (or outputting to braille) "begin
deletion" before and "end deletion" after (or "insertion" in the case
of <ins>).

> Simple html markup is the best way to go to make it accessible.

I agree.

> As for the
> strike out, i think it would be best to use good proper language writing to
> address the strike out issue.

But this contradicts your previous statement. The best way to make it
accessible is to allow the author to write it however they feel is
best using proper markup, and have AT support this standard mark-up.
Gone are the days when we can and should ask authors to stop using
standard and well-accepted markup and techniques because some AT has
yet to support markup that's been in existence for 12 years. I find it
interesting that we wring our hands about assistive technology and
ARIA and HTML5 support when most screen readers don't handle semantic
markup as simple as <strong> yet.

Jared