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On Wednesday 25 Jun 2003 5:47 pm, Jonathan Melhuish wrote: > > Access for those who cannot read the page for whatever reason is > > improved if the layout is rendered in CSS rather than tables. > > Can screen-readers not cope with tables? What is it about CSS that makes Screen readers cannot cope with LAYOUT tables. A table used for tabulated data is more or less manageable and is made easier with the newer table related HTML tags like <colgroup> <col>, more use of older ones that aren't used much: <th>, <caption>, and most importantly, proper use of the "one cell - one line - one row" principle: cell1 cell2 cell3 cell4 cell5 cell6 This table segment should be created thus: <tr><td>cell1></td><td>cell2</td><td>cell3</td></tr> <tr><td>cell4></td><td>cell5</td><td>cell6</td></tr> NOT: <tr><td> cell1<br> cell4</td> <td>cell2<br> cell5</td> <td>cell3<br> cell6</td></tr> The first table can be easily parsed by speech browsers: each cell will be read in the correct sequence. The second will parse as cell1 cell4 cell2 cell5 cell3 cell6 - completely losing the 'meaning' of the table. If you need to break a line, use rowspan and colspan, NOT br. <colgroup> and <col> are useful because (used properly) they allow the browser to predict the absolute size of the table and all cells before receiving the entire table HTML code. So for long tables, the text/speech can begin at row 1 without having to wait for row 100 to download. The CSS comes in at this point - CSS REMOVES the need for layout tables and therefore is intended to leave only genuine tabulated data in tables. > it easier to "read"? The W3C HTML4 intention is for layout tables to be made extinct and all layout to be done utterly and solely by CSS. The remaining tables should then use the newer and less common tags to correctly represent the data in a usable sequence. It is ongoing - there are still some pages where problems arise: 1. Browser support is almost there but not quite. 2. Some pages just seem to be awkward to get the correct CSS layout. It'll take me a bit longer but I am still working on those pages. Next on the agenda is for the stylesheet to automatically take into account the 'media' in use - screen, print, speech, text, etc. With ALL the layout and presentational constructs solely in CSS, the 'media' setting can control the rest of the job. HTML is for information. CSS is for presentation. > > Sorry for my ignorance, I'm afraid I shall probably stay that way unless > somebody gives me a compelling reason to change ;-) Your code will simply not work. Browser support for deprecated tags WILL be withdrawn - the conflicts with the new HTML4/CSS methods are too widespread to maintain, especially with the new CSS2 properties. Only the simplest pages and the standard compliant pages may survive. No Bad Thing. As CSS2 becomes more widespread, things like <font>, <center>, hspace, background, align and <align> will simply become impossible to fit into the engine - the deprecated tags are too crude and blunt, coping with the older tags whilst still rendering the detail and precision of CSS2 just doesn't appear worthwhile. Bad HTML code (like using <p><p> instead of <p></p>, missing of </li> or </option>) already causes the page to be displayed wrongly. It can only get worse. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk http://www.dclug.org.uk http://www.wewantbroadband.co.uk/
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