Back to an accessibility question…

Sunday AM, and my head is spinning from all of the interesting dialogue about RSS that is going on…. and still mulling over Merlot…

Leave it to Alan to dig up a cool resource on RSS at Lockergnome to spin me out further.By way of that resource, I tripped on another one at dotnetjunkies that talks about translating RSS to HTML…

Which got me thinking about something that has been in the back of my head for a while, and we did do some preliminary investigations on…

But I still am not sure that I have looked at this question enough…..

If we are placing RSS feeds into a course environment via a javascript command…. can a screen reader pick that up? I know that when I look at the source, I do not see anything but the javascript…

If not — is the RSS to HTML transformation one way of pulling that off? What other techniques might be used?

I think I need to visit our Disability resource centre…

I’m hoping someone with a bit more technical umphh out there in RSS and Weblogland can reassure me on this one…

Any help out there?

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3 Responses to Back to an accessibility question…

  1. Alan says:

    A very good question. I am not clear what happens when screen readers hit dynamic Javascript content, but my guess is they will skip it.

    The JavaScript approach is ultimately not the best, but beyond programmers and persons with access to server side tools that could natively parse the XML and display it.

    A possibly vialble alternative would be a NOSCRIPT tag that might have a link to a script that could parse and display the feeds as screen readable HTML.

    Worth digging into (not this week though, I am on vacatiob…)

  2. Here are a couple of links on accessibility issues when using javascript:
    http://snow.utoronto.ca/access/resources/javascript3.htm
    http://trace.wisc.edu/world/java/jseval.htm

    Using the nocript element, as Alan suggested, should work fine. While some screen readers/other assistive technologies might do fine with the javascript, support for that kind of dynamic content is still sporadic.

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