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Thread: Re: Foreign:Re: Screen readers and Arabic
Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)
From: Moore, Michael
Date: Tue, Sep 23 2008 10:10AM
Subject: Re: Foreign:Re: Screen readers and Arabic
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JAWS does not include Arabic by default, but an Arabic language pack has
been available from Freedom Scientific since JAWS 6.
Mike
From: Joshue O Connor
Date: Tue, Sep 23 2008 10:20AM
Subject: Re: Foreign:Re: Screen readers and Arabic
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Moore, Michael wrote:
> JAWS does not include Arabic by default, but an Arabic language pack has
> been available from Freedom Scientific since JAWS 6.
Thanks for that Mike.
Cheers
Josh
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From: Angela French
Date: Wed, Nov 12 2008 2:35PM
Subject: screen readers and empty paragraphs
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Can anyone tell me if there are any ramifications (for screen readers)
for empty paragraphs tags?
For example: <p></p>
Thank you!
Angela French
Internet Specialist
State Board for Community & Technical Colleges
360-704-4316
http://www.checkoutacollege.com
http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Wed, Nov 12 2008 2:50PM
Subject: Re: screen readers and empty paragraphs
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Angela French wrote:
> Can anyone tell me if there are any ramifications (for screen readers)
> for empty paragraphs tags?
You mean empty paragraph _elements_.
According to HTML specifications,
1) Authors should not use empty paragraphs.
2) User agents should ignore them.
But we need to add:
3) User agents don't always ignore them. Visual user agents may leave extra
empty space. I would not be surprised if some aural user agents treated them
as causing some extra pause.
The conclusion is that you should not use empty paragraphs. But if existing
pages contain them, you should probably spend your time more constructively
than removing empty paragraphs. Beware that they may have been inserted on
purpose, for spacing, and they may have that effect, so layout might get
changed. It is of course possible to create spacing using CSS, but cleaning
up existing pages is usually waste of time, and risky.
Actually it is probably much more common to have a paragraph that contains a
no-break space only, <p> </p>. It tends to cause spacing worth of one
empty line. It is technically not empty, so in principle HTML specs don't
say anything specific about them, but the spirit there is clearly that
spacing should be achieved using style sheets, not trickery with dummy HTML
elements.
> For example: <p></p>
Or for example the paragraph element in
<p>
<h2>Hello world</h2>
The old, 1990-style habit of using <p> as a paragraph _terminator_ often
creates unintended empty paragraphs.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
From: Moore, Michael
Date: Wed, Nov 12 2008 3:00PM
Subject: Re: screen readers and empty paragraphs
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I agree with Yucca, but I did try a short contrived experiment using
JAWS 9 and IE7.
I found that JAWS would report a "blank" for the first occurrence in a
series of <p> </p>. JAWS completely ignored <p></p>. The
interesting consequence of this was that if two headings were separated
by <p></p> or a series of <p></p> then JAWS would read the headings in a
continuous stream when reading by sentence, alt+down arrow, or
paragraph, cntrl+down arrow. Normal behavior would have been to stop
after each heading. Reading was exactly as expected when reading by
line, word, letter, or in say all mode.
Mike