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Re: hide decorative characters from screen readers

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 12, 2011 1:21PM

12.8.2011 11:37, Yves Serrano wrote:

> Often you have a character as navigation separator in horizontal navigation list.
> I use for example "-" or "|".

Accessibility recommendations used to say that adjacent links should be
separatated by some non-whitespace characters so that they can be
recognized as separate links. This idea seems to have been ignored in
WCAG 2.0, but it looks rather natural to me.

Speech rendering might nowadays avoid the issue e.g. so that the word
"link" is pronounced before each link - though I don't know whether this
is really universal. But in visual rendering the issue remains. Even if
underlining of links has not been prevented by the author, it can be
difficult to notice where a link text ends and a new link text begings

> We can hide decorative images with the empty alt attribute from the screen reader is there a solution for
> decorative characters?

I don't think the separators are decorative. They have a function
comparable to punctuation marks in texts.

But if you think that they disturb speech rendering and are not needed
in non-visual rendering at all, you might consider using CSS to set a
right border for each link, with some padding before it. It would look
like a vertical bar, just taller (and you could easily set its width and
color), and it would not affect speech rendering.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/