The acceptance of standards in the Web
development
industry is a similar tale of an educated minority fuelling change from
within
reluctant organizations. - Molly
Holzshlag
---
Tantek did focus mainly on how particular XHTML elements
should be
used to achieve semantically meaningful goals, but he went beyond the
basics.
Here, in rapid-fire form, are the ideas he put forward:
- <address> is not for street addresses, it=92s for the
website contact
information
- When quoting someone, you should put <cite> around that
person=92s name, and <blockquote cite==94url=93>
around the
quote itself.
- <del> and <ins> are perfectly suited to updating blog
posts
after the fact
- The semantics of tables can be made very specific (and very
stylable in
standards compliant browsers) using the axis and headers attributes of
table
header and cell tags, respectively.
---
Roger Hudson :
Some quick take-aways:
- A <label> tag surrounding a form field and its label text is
ignored
by many screen readers
- A <label> tag with a for attribute pointing to the ID of a
form
field works a lot more often
- Nested <fieldsets>, though endorsed by WaSP, are ignored by most
screen
readers
- Radio buttons cannot be browsed using a screen reader without
making a
selection
---
I learned one
thing in
this session: apparently SVG is supported by a lot of mobile phones.
---
Sometimes it
comes down
to thoughtful markup: why not put all required fields in a
=93required=94 fieldset
and all optional fields in an =93optional=94 fieldset? Sometimes you
really have to
play with a screen reader to come up with brilliantly simple ideas, like
submitting a form to a #results fragment identifier, which points
straight to a
link to the search results (#details) on the resulting page, thereby
allowing a
screen reader to skip right over your =93search again=94 field at the
top of the
page. - Derek Featherstone
---
In
particular,
modern screen readers (e.g. J
AWS)
generally ignore titles on text links by default (and with tweaking let
you hear
the title attribute value instead of the link text). - Steve
Faulkner
---
Beno=EEt
Meunier
Strat=E8ge
Web
514.962.2773
www.benoitmeunier.info