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Re: hide decorative characters from screen readers

for

From: Jason Kiss
Date: Aug 12, 2011 7:15PM

On 13/08/11 06:57, John Foliot wrote:
> Yes, I agree that screen readers (NVDA has the same behavior) shouldn't
> real aloud :before or :after pseudo-selector characters. We have a
> precedent here in that you cannot copy and paste those same characters
> from the browser screen (they are treated like background images) and
> screen readers should treat them the same way as well, IMHO.
>
> Anyone disagree, and if so why (please)?

I tend to agree with you, John, and foresee this possibly becoming a
thorny issue as the current draft of "Implementing UAAG 2.0"
(http://www.w3.org/TR/IMPLEMENTING-UAAG20/#sc-414) also suggests that
user agents should make CSS generated content available to accessibility
APIs:

"In user agents today, an author may inject content into a web page
using CSS (generated content). This content is written to the screen and
the CSS DOM. The user agent does not expose this generated content from
the CSS-DOM (as per CSS recommendation) to the platform accessibility
API or to the HTML-DOM. This generated content is non-existent to an
assistive technology user. The user agent should expose all information
from all DOMs to the platform accessibility API."

I wonder if browsers should then also be making such generated content
selectable for copy and paste?

Personally, I was happy thinking of CSS as being just for presentation
and style, and not also the creation of actual content.

Jason Kiss