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Re: evaluating accessibility with WCAG 2.0 (Angela French)

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From: Accessibility India
Date: Apr 11, 2011 11:36AM

Awesome discussion. I'd like to know how screen reader users
experience the <p> tag. Is it transparent? Does it have semantic
meaning? Do you expect
a certain content when you encounter one? I am a sighted user. But
to me, harkening back to early days of elementary school grammar, a
paragraph is a
distinct portion of writing that contains a particular thought or
idea, and consists of at least one sentence, usually more. If a <p>
tag has that same
meaning to a screen reader user, wouldn't a bunch of hyperlinked words
separated by a pipe be a nonsense sentence?

For a screen reader such as JAWS a blank line is encountered before
and after the paragraph i.e <p>. Alternately by using the short-cut
"p" with JAWS you can jump from one para to another. With NVDA you
cannot find much different with <p> tag. I tried using the short-cut
"p" on webpage with NVDA but cannot find any any paragraphs.
So if the user wants to jump from one paragraph to another they can
use short-cut p. Its not possible <p> tag is used. I recommend to use
scemantic HTML.