Quiz 5.2.9a: Screen Reader Test #9a
A colleague from the CSS-Discuss mail list, Zoe Gillenwater suggested a variant of “offleft.” This one uses a large negative left margin. Let’s try it. Please try SR Test 9a on every screen reader and browser you have.
September 14th, 2005 at 6:25 am
IBM Home Page Reader 3.04 speaks the hidden words, but does not display them. Exactly as expected.
September 14th, 2005 at 6:46 am
Jaws 6.1 and IE 6 speaks the hidden words, but does not display them. Exactly as expected.
September 14th, 2005 at 7:17 am
Window Eyes 5.0 and IE 6 speaks the hidden words, but does not display them. Exactly as expected.
September 14th, 2005 at 7:25 am
HAL 6.5.1 and IE6 speaks the hidden words, but does not display them. Exactly as expected.
September 14th, 2005 at 9:20 am
What’s the difference between putting something 1000px off to the left, and 9000px off to the left, then? In my last project, I actually put things off top and left… -1000 top, and -1000 left, and made it fixed.
Wouldn’t you expect these to all behave the same, no matter the pixel count? Or should I test my pages with all screen readers again?
September 14th, 2005 at 11:29 am
If you use 1000px, there’s the possibility that the hidden material will invade the viewport for people blessed with very high resolution screens.
For example, we started using off-left as 999px (save a byte!). That worked fine until the rich guy doen the hall walked in with a 1600×1200 laptop with a browser opened to full screen and asked about the wierd stuff overlaying the left part of the screen. That’s when we changed one line of CSS to 9000px.
It’ll be a while before we get to screens wide enough for 9000xp to be the same problem.
September 15th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
Why did you choos 9000? is there a better number, like when 999 saves a byte? why not choose 9999?
September 15th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
9000 is plenty large enough to keep the material from invading the viewport. 999 was not, and only saved one byte from 1000 which was also too small.
September 16th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Using WindowEyes 5.5 beta b with IE 6 the hidden words are spoken.
September 16th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
Window Eyes 5.5 betaB with Firebox 1.5 beta1 does speak the hidden words. The hidden words are not displayed (they were not displayed with IE 6, either).
September 16th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
JAWS 6.2 with IE 6 does speak the hidden words but they are not displayed. This surprised me since Bob found that JAWS 6.1 did not speak them???
September 16th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
oops, JAWS 6.1 does speak the hidden words - my mistake!
September 17th, 2005 at 8:46 am
THANKS Becky! Esp for the beta versions that a lot of people haven’t tried yet.