Reply to post: Re: A question about buttons...

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

Nick Kew
Holmes

Re: A question about buttons...

OK, someone had to view source. Might as well be me.

Shadow Systems is right, and his screenreader is also right. The arrows are nowhere in the markup, they're merely part of the stylesheet.

Here's a relevant cut&paste .. damn, neither unescaped nor fully-escaped works here, I'm going to switch <> to [] instead:

[div class=actions] [a class="vote up" title="Like this post? Vote for it!" data-user-vote="true" href="https://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/vote/up/3687493"] 9 [/a] [a class="vote down" title="Dislike this post? Vote it down!" href="https://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/vote/down/3687493"] 0 [/a]

What Shadow Systems describes is exactly what's there. Putting on my accessibility hat, I'd say that's a real issue, and should be remedied.

The simplest remedy would be to add the up and down arrows as icon images within the links: this is what it already looks like to a visual browser. Then alt=upvote / alt=downvote will render just fine in a screenreader. The drawback there is the extra markup, but the icons themselves are purely passive: being within the links is what matters, and you can get rid of that abusive use of the title attribute on the links.

There is probably an alternative solution using an audio stylesheet to inform screenreaders, but my knowledge of the subject is way too outdated to suggest implementation details.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon