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Re: the "Read More" links vs elipsis

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From: Nancy Johnson
Date: Dec 7, 2011 11:48AM

I've used the javascript "View more/View less" a number of times...
but sometimes that doesn't work visually as a large news story needs
to open on it's own page. Even on sites I control manually, I have
a difficult time coming up with some text that makes sense and is not
"read more"... I like the hidden view approach just so it doesn't
interfere with search engines.

For dynamic sites
If it is a large dynamic environment, the backend developers could
easily pull a title of some sort into the arialabelledby text.

for the smaller dynamic sites like Wordpress,... it would be difficult
for some like me to hand build a plug-in to do the same task. I
would need to find a tutorial...

Nancy.


On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Angela French < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>>