demonhale — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:05:06 +0000

no prob, glad I could help...

Megan — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:02:47 +0000

Belated thanks, demonhale! I've got that working on most of my recent posts now!

demonhale — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:12:37 +0000

Quote: As a sidenote - does anyone know how to post exceprts instead of full links in wordpress?

use the tag at any point of the article and it will cut it at that point and add a read more link at the bottom, when clicked shows the article in full and on single article with comment at the bottom...

Busy — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:55:53 +0000

A few years ago I was able to go through some of my sites with a screen reader (Jaws - don't remember the version).
It's very slow on a long page (most of mine are/were) and is amazing how much html it picked up, luckily the tabled layouts were readable as they were laid out properly. Have never seen/heard one with using CSS.

On a similar note, no one can code a site 100% to comply to any screen reader as most is guessed off guidelines. I was hoping after the US made it illegal not to comply to 508 or WAI for some sort of free editor. Last time I priced one up it was about $400 US and that was a cheapie.
You basically have to pick a disability and work to that, but in doing so you'll cut a lot out. Even WAI and 508 aren't 100% compatiable.
There is a lot of great information out there about accessibility but be very careful as a lot of it's wrong. A lot of it is from Chinese whipsers (gets taken from one site, spruced up, then another and another as they do and it gets changed), a lot is also outdated

Just thought of another tag re your other thread - tabindex

Megan — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 20:35:37 +0000

I've got a longer summary up on my blog

As a sidenote - does anyone know how to post exceprts instead of full links in wordpress? I don't think I want to do that all the time, just for longer articles. Well, most of mine are longer (blabbermouth!) so maybe it would be best to do that all the time...

Megan — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:16:00 +0000

Thanks, Ian.

Busy - I totally agree with you there. To add to the confusion, there are several different screen readers that people could be using but they don't all behave in the same way. This came up when people were talking about using display: none to hide text from visual users while displaying an image as a CSS background instead (because some screen readers would obey the display:none and not read it).

There is quite a lot of great information out there about accessibility. Yesterday I printed a 34 page article about writing alt text! There's a lot to learn

IanD — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:46:05 +0000

Derek's site is boxofchocolates.ca (not aboxofchocolates.com)

Busy — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:00:19 +0000

lucky you, would love for something like that to come up here, I have heaps of questions for them, but biggest one is, if it's so important (and I already agree it is) why isn't there a free screen reader or even a online version webmasters can use like we use w3c to validate our code.
Look forward to reading your blog

Megan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:55:07 +0000

I forgot to mention that we also got a chance to hear a screen reader in action. This one wasn't as fast as the one I'd heard previously, although the users can change the speed. The important thing to know about screen readers is that they read everything. They will read all puntuation, for example, including | which gets read as "vertical bar". I'm definitely going to stop using those to separate navigation items and title bits! Lots of searching and replacing to do now!

They also read out what type of text something is. If they are reading a link they will say "link, (title of link)" and they do the same for headers. When they load up a page they will say how many links and headings the page has. The user can then use keyboard shortcuts to navigate from header to header. The message here is mainly to make sure your page is structured properly and to use headers to break up text where appropriate. And properly structured headers too!