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Thread: Re: Hidden Frames and Screen Readers

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From: Josh Richards
Date: Mon, Feb 24 2003 10:36AM
Subject: Re: Hidden Frames and Screen Readers
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Terence,

First of all, thank you for your reply. Perhaps this email will clarify our
current issues with frames and screen readers.

Our software uses both nested frames and "hidden" frames--frames that are
not visually perceptible to sighted users. The main console in our product
appears as a single element to sighted users, but in actuality it is
composed of several distinct frames.

Unfortunately, we can not completely remove our dependence on these frames.
As an example, we use "hidden" frames to save state information across a
user's session even when other frames are unloaded.

It should be technically possible to redo most of product using CSS and
JavaScript, but this would require extensive coding and debugging; however,
if it is our only option it will have to be done...

Ideally, I would like to see screen readers support some method[s] to
suppress the reading/parsing of pages/frames as decided by the developer.
Perhaps custom doc-types, dummy tags, or even special case certain titles,
for example, any objects with a title="ignore" could be agreed upon by the
screen-reader developers as a do-not-read object. Something as simple as
this might have some real impact and help improve the web experience for
assisted web viewers.

If any other developers have encountered similar problems, I'd love to hear
about your solutions.

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