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Re: Headings and link text

for

From: Mallory van Achterberg
Date: Sep 8, 2014 9:55AM

On Mon, Sep 08, 2014 at 11:18:44AM -0400, Liko, Todd wrote:
> One proposition is to add invisible text at the end of each link so that screen readers will read out and identify each link.

I've seen this technique used in a similar setup, a sourceforge-like
page where the heading stated the document version of each file.

h2
MS Word

- foo (so actually foo.doc)
- bar

h2
PDF

- foo (so actually foo.pdf)
- bar

And they did just that:
[a]foo[span] Word doc[/span][/a]
...
[a]foo[span] PDF[/span][/a]

Spans were eiter clipped or pulled offscreen, I forget which.
Important was the spaces: visually the user shouldn't have seen
an extending underling from a space, but a space was needed between
filename and type, so it goes in the span.

Normally I like hidden text to come first, because people skim, but
with names like these, even visually we're used to them being tacked
at the end.

I think also it was a bad idea here-- file types should also just
be in the link name anyway. But that might just be too much clutter
on the site you're referring to.

_mallory