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RE: Do screen readers read hidden text?

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Jul 13, 2003 6:50AM

David Hoffman wrote:
> I am told that JAWS 5.0 will ignore such hidden text unless it is in
> explicit label tags. This will allow developers to supplement
> the screen text for the benefit of screen readers, when necessary.

Hi David,

I don't suppose you could ask your Jaws source what the rational is for
this?

I thought that the label tag was just for form controls, which would
mean you couldn't use this method for most of the purposes I currently
use hidden text/links.

Wouldn't a better method be to use the media attribute of the style
sheet? So if a style sheet was set to media="screen", Jaws would ignore
the rules defined in that sheet. If the developer knows enough to be
usefully hiding text from visual browsers, they are fairly likely to
know about the media attribute.

This would also have the advantage of being much easier for people (like
me) to alter the current sites without having to change more than one
line in the HTML. I have a fairly delicate balance of graceful
degradation using style sheets that lumps browsers into 3 main
categories:
- Basic text / non-visual browsers (lynx etc that have no support for
CSS, but receive well structured HTML).
- Older browsers (e.g. Netscape 4, that understand some styles, but not
the @import rule. They receive a slightly plainer version).
- Version 5+ browser (that do understand the @import rule, and get all
the styles).

At the moment, screen readers sit with the Older browsers, since they
ignore the @import, and this is advantageous for the user group. Adding
support for the @import to Jaws would have the effect of making it more
difficult to help screen reader users.

I'm trying to think of a situation where a developer would hide content,
and it would help someone with a screen-reader or text based browser not
to receive that content, but I can't think of one.

-Alastair


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