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Thread: Re: Can I make my family tree chart accessible
Number of posts in this thread: 2 (In chronological order)
From: Terence de Giere
Date: Sun, Jul 20 2003 7:04PM
Subject: Re: Can I make my family tree chart accessible
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Brent --
You could try nested definition lists. I have used these for
organizational charts. Still, it can get pretty complex with this many
levels. However tables are probably more difficult to figure out. I
think a graphic for sighted users, and definition lists, <DL>, for
readers and text browsers would produce the best results. The definition
term <DT> would be, say, "Parents", and the definition <DD>their names
(each one in a DD element under the "Parents" term. Some additional
identifying text would be needed. There is an HTML attachment to this
email, that will probably get stripped off the forum with a partial
example. CSS can be used to get a clearer format for visual users
reading a definition list.
Terence de Giere
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
===============Brent Ashworth wrote:
Hi. I created a chart of several generations of my ancestors by using a
table with lots of cells and generous use of rowspan and colspan. How
exactly would using CSS instead make it accessible when page readers
read tables in a linear fashion? Could someone please check out the
chart on my site and help me create css code to make the chart appear
the same but be accessible? My site is at:
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~brentspg/index2.html
--------------000906070408060303000208
Content-Type: text/html;
name="family-tree-sample.htm"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename="family-tree-sample.htm"
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Family Tree</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<DL>
<DT>Current Generation</DT>
<DD>Name: Brent Ashworth
<DL>
<DT>Parents</DT>
<DD>Father: Warren Ashworth
<DL>
<DT>Paternal Grandparents</DT>
<DD>Paternal Grandfather: Sidney Ashworth</DD>
<DD>Paternal Grandmother: Violetta Sponberg
<DL>
<DT></DT>
</DL>
</DD>
</DL>
</DD>
<DD>Mother: Carolyn La Tourette
<DL>
<DT>Maternal Grandparents</DT>
<DD>Maternal Grandfather: Donald La Tourette</DD>
<DD>Maternal Grandmother: Elsa Ehlers</DD>
</DL>
</DD>
</DL>
</DD>
</DL>
</BODY>
</HTML>
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mon, Jul 21 2003 4:53AM
Subject: Re: Can I make my family tree chart accessible
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On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Terence de Giere wrote:
> The definition
> term <DT> would be, say, "Parents", and the definition <DD>their names
> (each one in a DD element under the "Parents" term.
Sorry, but that sounds really absurd, even if you don't accept my
criticism of <DL> abuse in general
( http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/def.html#impl ).
A _definition_ for the term "parent" would say what we _mean_ by the word
"parent" in some context, e.g. the normal meaning in everyday language, or
the technospeak meaning 'immediately containing element', or 'the
process that spawned the current process', or something else. This is
_completely_ distinction from naming the parents of someone or something.
A definition for "parent" must be given or implied, before it makes any
sense to say "the parents of ... are" (or, in the odd technospeak, which
is actually an accessibility problem at language level, "the parent of
... is ..."). Hence it is absurd to call such information a definition.
If you're going to abuse <DL> _that_ bad, what are you going to use for a
real list of definitions?
Regarding family trees, there's hardly any better approach in practice
than using tables, though in theory you could use nested <UL> lists for
the structure and CSS for the formatting. On browsers that support the
display property in full, it is relatively easy to present lists in
tabular manner - but unfortunately IE 6 is not among those browsers.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/