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Re: the "Read More" links vs elipsis

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From: Angela French
Date: Dec 7, 2011 10:15AM

I have read the various suggestions and while they are great if you get to hand code a page, for a site that is maintained by content editors using a CMS where writing any code at all is impossible, I have to resort to a more "spelled-out" solution for the typical "read more" approach.

Angela French


>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
>