Comments on: Standards and Accessibility – navigation lists

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 08:47:03 +0000

Actually, I’m undecided about whether to switch to strict (I like the discipline, but there’s the old mime-type debate) or whether to go to html 4.01 strict.

Either way, though, there’s a hell of a lot of scripts to write to retrofit old posts.

So inertia and a dash of ignorance will ensure that nothing will happen!

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:29:35 +0000

Ah, didn’t realise you were still on Transitional. It’s invalid in Strict documents. It’s still worth fixing, though – less of a headache if you want to move to Strict if you don’t have to fix up a load of comments.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 15:01:22 +0000

Thanks Jim. You're completely accurate, of course, that you can layout tables with CSS, and even use cunning positioning to place table cells in an order other than tabular order (see my absolute positioned tables test, in which I have a 2x2 table and use absolute positoning to move the table cells around into a completely illogical order). But what's the point? Why not use an arbitrary container like a div which can be positioned at will, as showcased on things like the css zen garden, rather than (mis-)use a structural element like a table for presentational layout, and then confuse the issue further by positioning the cells in what appears to be the incorrect order? About the b-quote button: do you mean that text that is blockquoted should be inside another tag (eg a paragraph tag) rather than just inside the blockquote (eg, are you saying that

Hello

is wrong)? I'm using xhtml 1 transitional, and I tried a "naked blockquote" test, and it validates just fine.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:12:36 +0000

Personally, I’d want the flexibility of the layout that used a div rather than a table cell (eg, an alternative stylesheet that could allow the user to choose whether the nav appears on the left or the right of the page regardless of where it comes in the source), but that’s not an accessibility issue.

It’s no issue at all – you can style tables in the same way as div elements. There’s no reason you need to stick to the default layout of tables.

PS: your b-quote button generates invalid markup – it wrapped the text in blockquote tags – the blockquote element needs block-level children like p elements, not PCDATA.

By: davidbisset.com » Standards and Accessibility - Navigation Lists

davidbisset.com » Standards and Accessibility - Navigation Lists — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:05:33 +0000

[...]

davidbisset.com

Standards and Accessibility – Navigation Lists I’m long overdue for an Accessibility link, no? [ via ]
[...]

By: The Frog Blogger

The Frog Blogger — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:47:10 +0000

Brucie, Baby!

Apple have also muscled their way into the screen reader market with VoiceOver. It’s built into Tiger (Mac OS X.4).

I tested it out and although it’s not enormously intuitive to begin with (*Frog Blogger: “How do I _start_ the darn thing?”*), the fact that it comes ready integrated makes it an interesting addition to the Apple armoury.

You can alter some of the voices to readreallyfastifyouhavetogetthroughadocumentbeforeyetanothermeeting and you can adjust the pitch and volume of others according to the type of content they’re reading – news: authoritative, etc. I didn’t play with any of the settings, though – I tried it “straight out of the box” (Mr Jobs would have been so proud) and IM(very)HO, it’s cool!

Well worth the price of a Mac mini, I reckon… *The Frog Blogger looks around shiftily, hoping no one noticed the brief slip into Mac geek mode*