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the "Read More" links vs elipsis

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 6, 2011 4:30PM


Hi guys

Curious if there are any opinions on this.
Most sites that carry news stories and articles often have the title
of the news story as a link, then a few lines from the article,
followed by a "read more" link, that points to the same target as the
title of the news story.
This makes it a bit cumbersome to employ the list of links feature in
most screen readers, which allow the user to bring up all the links on
the page in a listbox and select a link from there.

Another approach I have seen is simply to end the displayed part of
the news story with an elipsis (...), indicating there is more but it
is not displayed unless a user clicks on the link. This does require
screen reader users to scroll up a few lines to find the title of the
news story (or use shift-tab to get to the previous link).

A third approach, employed by Groupon for instance, is to have a "rad
more" link that is simply a Javascript that displays the rest of the
text on the same page, that way the user does not have to open a new
page to read the rest of the story.
Are there any thoughts on this, pros and cons of each approach.
I like either of the latter two approaches, as a screen reader user.
I do want to recommend the second approach to people whose web pages I
evaluate, but not unless I get some input from the real experts in the
field (I am aspiring to be one but definitely not there yet).
Thanks
-B