Re: text fot acccessibility / was Re: Another W3C strict query

At 08:17 27/05/02 +0100, Hilma wrote:
>But this has led me onto  more problems, with the amount of (repeated) text
>now being added into my html.
>
>It's bad enough that every nav-bar link now has code for "pipes" in for
>text-only browsers -
>  <em style="display:none">||</em>

This _isn't_ what you want. First of all, display: none will hide the pipes 
from all CSS aware browsers, including aural ones.

Secondly, the em element should only be used for text that you want to be 
emphasized. The pipes don't have any semantic meaning - they are 
essentially an otherwise meaningless navigation aid. You want to wrap them 
in an inline element that has no semantic meaning. Yes, you actually want 
to use span here!

I'd be inclined to use

<span class="pipe">||</span>

with

span.pipe {color: transparent} in the CSS. This should make the pipes 
invisible in graphic browsers, but `visible' everywhere else, which is what 
you need.

(Normally I'd experiment with this a bit, but I'm a bit on the busy side at 
the moment. Let me know if it doesn't work and I'll see what else I can 
come up with.)

>  (despite being nice and compact, thank you Bert, it occurs 10-15 times per
>page);
>but when i start tagging every photo (or link) with sensible text plus "this
>will open a new window" i'm going to end up with a huge amount of extra
>bytes.

Not that many. HTTP 1.1 (and unless you specified otherwise that is the 
version that will be used for your site) compresses HTML on the fly. Lots 
of repeated text compresses very nicely.

The extra text is useful information. You want to keep the useful 
information in the page.

Andrew

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http://aamcf.co.uk/

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