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RE: Discussion for assistive technology users.

for

From: Randy Pearson
Date: Jan 23, 2004 7:49AM

When browsing the web, does JAWS work with a specific browser, or does it
simply read the screen that results from any browser? What I'm really
looking for is whether our server application, when reading the "user-agent"
string from the header, can tell that the response is targeted to a
screen-reader.

Separately, on the topic of emoticon-equivalents, such as smileys, we're
wondering what would get the attention of various assistive technologies.
Lets say you had message board software that parsed for occurrences of
strings like ":-)" and could decorate the HTML as it was rendered. Would it
be of any value to decorate this like so:

<span title="smiley face">:-)</span>

Alternatively, a parser could swap in a matching emoticon image, and use the
ALT text--probably a superior approach for various tyles of users.

-- Randy


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