Screen readers and layouts (opinions)
Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 5:50 pm
Mainly out of curiosity but...
According to the W3C (and I agree whole-heartedly on this), everybody should be able to view your content. If that content is only available online and you use a table based layout you are effectively (perhaps without even knowing it) discriminating against visually impaired users.
I do use CSS to build all layouts to valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and therefore (to date) minimize the toll that HTML layouts can take on a screen reader but I have, until now, never considered actually experiencing my content through a screen reader in order to best improve my coding therefore increasing the enjoyment for visually impaired users. I mean, we all keep checking our layouts on-screen and make judgements and improvements based upon what we see. Why not do the same with a screen reader?
I'm just curious if anybody else does this and if everybody agrees that this is worthwhile thing to do?
For me... the more people that enjoy my content, the more I enjoy coding it
According to the W3C (and I agree whole-heartedly on this), everybody should be able to view your content. If that content is only available online and you use a table based layout you are effectively (perhaps without even knowing it) discriminating against visually impaired users.
I do use CSS to build all layouts to valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and therefore (to date) minimize the toll that HTML layouts can take on a screen reader but I have, until now, never considered actually experiencing my content through a screen reader in order to best improve my coding therefore increasing the enjoyment for visually impaired users. I mean, we all keep checking our layouts on-screen and make judgements and improvements based upon what we see. Why not do the same with a screen reader?
I'm just curious if anybody else does this and if everybody agrees that this is worthwhile thing to do?
For me... the more people that enjoy my content, the more I enjoy coding it