Accessible Hidden Text

Jul 10, 2007

I just ran across an excellent article entitled Why “left: -9999px;” is Better For Accessibility Than “display: none;”. It discusses the two primary means by which web developers try to hide text (usually to allow for accessible logos or titles), and why using an offset is (often) better than just simply making it invisible. The author also explains why this is better, using some documentation from Microsoft on Internet Explorer accessibility. Looks like I need to fix my websites!

a11y articles design
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3 Comments

kip

8:06 PM on Jul 10, 2007
When I read the subject of this post, I thought you were talking about how to make accessible, to which I was going to have to ask why in the world one would want or need to do that. :)

kip

8:07 PM on Jul 10, 2007
that should read: When I read the subject of this post, I thought you were talking about how to make HTML comments accessible, to which I was going to have to ask why in the world one would want or need to do that. I had the phrase "HTML comments" in an HTML comment, so it hid it.

Jonah

8:32 PM on Jul 10, 2007
I probably could have come up with a better title, had I given it a little more thought. It's funny that the comment parser in WordPress doesn't catch HTML comments (and escape them appropriately). Although, I do see the comment characters in the HTML source of your comment. It's odd that the characters didn't get converted properly (a WordPress bug?).

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