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accomodating repeated links (WAS Re: examples of accessible sites )

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Sep 20, 2004 9:08AM

> The link "Read More" appears multiple times on a page. When a person
> with a screen reader brings up the list of links, the links will be
> out of context, and so the user can't tell where a "Read More" link
> will go.

This comment brings up a point I need to address on our web site. Right now,
we have a section of our site where people can download legal forms. We try
to publish these in both MS Word and Adobe PDF formats. Right now, the links
are set up as such:

title of form 1: MS Word, Adobe PDF
title of form 2: MS Word, Adobe PDF
title of form 3: MS Word, Adobe PDF

This is a fairly compact and easy to understand list if you're fully
sighted. Not so easy if you're not.

In doing a bit of research, it seems as if some viable solutions are:

1) repeat the title twice, as a link, with the file fromated stated.
This would work, but tends to make the visual layout much more
crowded, verbose, and not as usable.

2) Put the form name into the TITLE attribute of each link.
I really like this option, but, from my understanding, there's
no guarantee that any specific screen reader set-up is set to
read the TITLE attributes.

3) use CSS to absolutely position the title of the document off-
screen in visual browsers but remain for screen readers.
for instance:

title of form 1: title of form 1 in MS Word

4) use a proper table with the title of the document being in the TH
cell and each format in their own respective column.
This is more of a thought than anything I've tested. I'm not
sure if this is a viable option or not.

Any thoughts on the above options or viable alternatives? I'm thinking the
3rd seems to be the best option, but also seems to be a bit of a hack.

-Darrel