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Re: Do screen readers read hidden text?

for

From: Tom Gilder
Date: Jul 13, 2003 10:56AM

On Sunday, July 13, 2003, 4:32:31 PM, Alastair Campbell wrote:
> The most common usage is to hide skip links. As pointed out earlier,
> they should probably be provided visually, but I tend to use CSS based
> layouts with the content at the top of the HTML page. I'm not sure who
> would benefit from visual skip links in this case, since when tabbing
> through links most browsers follow the code rather than layout.

Probably nobody - but they will benefit from skip to *navigation*
links. By the way, here's what I use to hide skip links:

a.skip {
position: absolute;
overflow: hidden;
width: 0;
height: 0;
}

a.skip:active, a.skip:focus {
position: absolute;
overflow: visible;
width: auto;
height: auto;
background-color: yellow;
color: red;
top: 5px;
left: 5px;
padding: 5px;
border: 2px solid red;
font-weight: bold;
}

...I find it works fairly well myself. The only modern graphical
browser that doesn't like it is Opera, but that's got
better-than-average keyboard navigation anyway.

--
Tom Gilder, http://tom.me.uk/
Blog! http://blog.tom.me.uk/



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