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Re: hide decorative characters from screen readers

for

From: Chris Hoffman
Date: Aug 12, 2011 6:54PM

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 7:36 PM, Keith Parks < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> So it would be a better practice to use CSS to add a visual separator (vertical line) rather than use CSS to add the vertical bar character?
>
> Is that the take-away from this?

I think the takeaway is that we are reminded that there are two
conflicting schools of thought regarding web accessibility. The first
says that there are certain parts of a page that just don't need to be
perceivable because they are purely decorative. Icons in front of the
text in menu items, for example. The other school says that the only
person who can say what should and shouldn't be perceivable is the one
viewing the page, and that the tiny picture of an envelope in front of
the phrase "email us" is a part of the page content and should not be
hidden. The ARIA spec is siding with the first school. There are good
arguments on both sides, and you can undoubtedly hear them all from
the folks on this list.

From a design perspective, this makes Yves' original problem quite
difficult to resolve. He could use a border as a separator, but that's
not an ideal solution. A vertical bar that has been designed as part
of a typeface will likely look much better in the context of the rest
of the text, for example, and getting the border to resize
aesthetically when the rest of the text is resized would be difficult,
even if he specified the width in ems. If he uses an offset background
image, the resizing problem is even worse, since those won't resize at
all.

As Birkir pointed out, though (and I've seen this sentiment repeated
before), the extraneous separator characters might not be as big a
distraction as sighted designers think. As a user who is neither blind
nor visually-impaired, for example, I see the > characters that begin
every line of your quoted email above, and they give me information
about what those lines mean but don't distract me from reading them.
The fact that I can perceive the > characters with my eyes is
independent of the fact that I can ignore them when reading the quoted
lines, and there is little good reason to presume that someone who is
listening to rather than looking at the lines wouldn't do the same and
just as well.

Chris