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RE: Off-left vs. block/none oddity.

for

From: Steven Faulkner
Date: Feb 5, 2006 6:00PM

Can anyone suggest why the CSS z-index property could not used to
position content behind other content (as against pushing content off
screen), so it is effectively hidden from visual presentation, but
available to screen readers (as the z-index is not interpreted by screen
readers as far as i know).

Here is a (not particularly good) example of this method I experimented
with a while back, using it to visually present a number of simple data
tables as one complex table.
http://www.nils.org.au/ais/table.html


with regards


Steven Faulkner
Web Accessibility Consultant
vision australia - information & library service
454 Glenferrie Road
Kooyong Victoria 3144
Phone: (613) 9864 9281
Fax: (613) 9864 9210
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
www.accessibleinfo.org.au | www.wat-c.org

Download the Web Accessibility Toolbar
[http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/ais/toolbar/]

Vision Australia was formed through the merger of the Royal Blind
Society
NSW, the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind, Vision Australia
Foundation and the National Information & Library Service.
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]On Behalf Of Christian
> Heilmann
> Sent: Saturday, 4 February 2006 1:23 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: [WebAIM] Off-left vs. block/none oddity.
>
>
> I did a demo of a Outlook style panel for a friend yesterday:
> http://www.icant.co.uk/sandbox/dom-panel-bar/
>
> Now, normally I am advocating and using the off-left technique for
> hiding and showing elements, but as I was lazy in this case I used
> display block and none in JavaScript instead.
>
> Funnily enough, this seems to have made it a lot easier to use the
> menu with a keyboard now as the hidden links don't show up in the tab
> order unless you activate one of the parent links.
>
> The question now is how screen readers deal with the activation and
> navigation in it. If that is fine, I think it is a more obvious choice
> for JavaScript driven menus to go the block/none way - pending you
> don't hide the elements via CSS from the beginning.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
>
> Chris Heilmann
> Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
> Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
> Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/
>
>
>


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