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Re: CSS-P, layers, links and accessibility

for

From: Joycde Kennedy
Date: Jul 25, 2001 10:04AM

If I could jump in (Hi, Leo...nice to meet you!) and put in a few
cents from an end-user point of view.
Although the monopolistic grip Microsoft has on the market bugs
me, the reality is that many of the folks that need and
use predictable tabbing are very often using IE 5 and not Netscape,
because the assistive technology they are using supports IE 5 and
not Netscape. Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Jaws come to mind.
Not that every effort should not be made to make pages accessible
in Netscape, but the reality is that Netscape has not made itself
amenable to interfacing well with assistive technology.
On 25 Jul 2001, at 11:30, Jo Miller < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> At 10:07 -0500 7/25/01, Tom Dahm wrote:
> >Leo,
> >
> >I'd advise you to stay away from CSS positioning. Netscape 4
> >doesn't support this reliably enough to make it a safe technology,
> >and NN 4 still makes up about 15% of the browser market.
>
> I agree that Netscape's spotty and unpredictable support means that
> CSS positioning should be used sparingly (at least for now) and tested
> carefully on multiple platforms.
>
> Note, by the way, that Netscape 4.x-6 will also prevent you from
> tabbing to links and form fields within a table if you've used the
> ALIGN attribute to position the table. The same is true if you use
> ALIGN with images that are links; Netscape users will not be able to
> tab to those links.
>
> How important are Netscape's tabbing issues? That's a question worth
> discussing, since tabbers (like me) do have the option of using IE.
> Netscape for Mac doesn't support tabbing at all (and I don't think
> Netscape/Linux does either, does it?). -- Jo Miller <EMAIL REMOVED>
>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joyce Kennedy, ATP
Adaptive Technology Specialist
University of Southern Maine
144 Luther Bonney
Portland, ME 04104-9300
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(207)780-4029 / fax (207)780-4565
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