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Re: hide decorative characters from screen readers

for

From: Jason Kiss
Date: Aug 17, 2011 2:48AM

On 15/08/11 22:35, Yves Serrano wrote:
>> Jason Kiss wrote:
>> ...
>> Personally, I was happy thinking of CSS as being just for presentation
>> and style, and not also the creation of actual content.
> I overall argue with that.
> One use case I found a bit against this, is with a responsive table approach.
> See http://css-tricks.com/9096-responsive-data-tables/ here the table header content is replicated, to make it more accessible to small screens.
> But this is only an edge case.

Thanks for that example, Yves. In the case of the responsive table
approach, I'd agree, and take the opportunity to refine my statement to
say that I don't think CSS should be used to add meaningful content that
isn't otherwise already available in some way on the page. In the case
of the responsive table, the column headers are already there, so simply
replicating the headers via CSS content I wouldn't consider an all-out
creation of new actual content.

That said, with your example you also afforded me the opportunity to
rethink my position on CSS content added with :after and :before and
whether or not screen readers should read it. I'm now inclined to think
that, as long as CSS is not misused to add entirely new content the
meaning or intent of which is not otherwise unavailable with CSS off or
with some user stylesheet that overrides the relevant author styles,
screen readers should be reading that generated content (and
additionally, that browsers should likely provide some facility for
copying/pasting that same content). The responsive data tables are a
good example in this regard as, in NVDA and VoiceOver at any rate, the
replicated column headers are read aloud, and make interacting with the
responsive table a reasonable experience.

Jason