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Re: Re[2]: Re[2]: Dayton Art Alternative Descriptions

for

From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Nov 11, 2004 9:41AM

> From: michael.brockington

> My understanding is that this is the primary difference
> between designing for
> a Screen Reader, and designing for an Aural Browser; the
> latter read the HTML
> (and ignore the CSS) while the former interpret the output of
> the underlying
> application, such as IE, and therefore read pretty much
> exactly what is
> displayed on screen, as modified by CSS and Javascript where present.

Well, can't vouch for all screen readers, but certainly JAWS (4.02 anyway)
ignores the "visual" order on screen and reads out the document exactly
as it's marked up in the source (unless, of course, you have some
javascript that munges and reorders the DOM, or CSS which removes elements from
the DOM itself via display:none - although 4.02 still quite happily reads those
out as well). It could be, however, that certain other screen readers do
something more akin to screen scraping, and hence base the order of the output
on the CSS as well.

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk