grahamstewart - 2:41 pm on Jan 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

Yep, I'm agreeing that the technique itself is not accessible. But I believe that it's use allows us to produce accessible pages that we otherwise could not produce.

Look at it this way...

The Problem

You want to use nice <h> tags to markup your document. You know its the 'right' thing to do and it will be usable to peope with screen readers.

But your boss/client/mother-in-law insists that <h> tags look too boring and you should use those pretty, inaccessible, bandwidth-sucking images that the graphics department produced.

So...

Solution One - non-FIR
You could go ahead and just replace all the <h> tags with <img> tags, after all the screen reader can read the alt text right?

But now you have just ruined the semantic purity of your HTML, meaning if your site style changes you will have to change the HTML as well as the CSS.

Furthermore, it is now much more difficult for you to support multiple stylesheets.

Solution Two - FIR
Instead you could use FIR to replace the <h> tags with images in the CSS. As pointed out this is NOT good for acessibility.

However, you can now supply a second 'alternate' stylesheet which DOESN'T activate the FIR and the <h> tags will be present in all their glory. You might refer to this as your 'Text View', or your 'Low Bandwidth' view.

In fact, the user can benefit without you even doing this, because modern browsers allow them to turn the stylesheet off themselves (with a single click in Opera).

(You might also choose to use have the <h> tags visible in your print or handheld stylesheets.)

Conclusion

Yes, its not perfect. But then perhaps screen readers could do themselves and us a favour by supporting the 'aural' stylesheet.

Given the situation above I would use FIR every time.