Accessibility.

Separate adjacent links with more than whitespace.

[D_Blackwell]

Separate adjacent links with more than whitespace.

Is it a failing of the standard that this should be required, or is it really important, and something that should fall to me? I nearly always accommodate this nettlesome point, but sometimes wonder why. Shouldn't the people who make accessibility stuff be able to figure out where one link ends, and another begins?

<a>abc</a>

I completed a CSS Calendar/Schedule of Events, and didn't see a good way to comply without mucking things up. In the end it didn't comply, though it was a secondary goal.

I almost always pass all of the automated checks for AAA compliance, and then give 'best effort' for the user checks. I may not be fully compliant when claiming to be, but so far there have been no complaints. That actually disappoints me in some respects, because I'm always hoping that someone will 'educate' me on details that I might not consider.

(Is accessibility still too 'fringe' to make it as a forum here?)

[Longhaired Genius]

> Shouldn't the people who make accessibility stuff be able to figure out where one link ends, and another begins?

I think the answer to that is, yes.

In the past I have always put some sort of delimiting character between horizontal links, but in the future I plan to move to horizontally-styled lists of links (where appropriate). I've just tested this approach on an online accessibility-tester and it passed, even though there are no visible delimiters.

[limbo]

I plan to move to horizontally-styled lists of links (where appropriate)

I think this is the best way to display groups of links. This way the semantics (starting to hate that word) are correct and you can use CSS to get them to do what you want.

[scintex]

I remember reading a thread about this somewhere (it might have even been here, somewhere) however from memory I think people were saying that they separate using:

> for breadcrumb-like horizontal menus
-
:
cells in a table

it also went on to discuss each option and how '>' is visually ok since we know its a bit like a file structure however it mean greater than, so it makes no sense. The same goes for the others- visually ok (we know what the author is getting at) yet if you used a screen reader, you'd make no sense.

I think the summary was something like (again from memory, sorry):

Use lists where you can, with appropriate H tags (H1, H2 etc.) however for the horizontal links (like the ones in footers for example), use a pipe character:

Mylink1 ¦ mylink2 ¦ mylink3 ¦ mylink4

Edit: For some reason I cant get the pipe char to display properly :-/

I must admit I havent got as far as you with the standards, so yet to formally address this one however it was something I just happened to notice one day in a post.

S

[moltar]

I completed a CSS Calendar/Schedule of Events

I assume you did something like the following for the calendar part?

<a href="...">1</a><a href="...">2</a><a href="...">3</a>...

In that case this is incorrect. If you would use a table, which in this case would be 100% correct, you wouldn't run into a problem of a having to use a separator.

See, the calendar has been tabular for as long as I remember it. Thus using a table for this matter should be very acceptable.

See the way I showed it in the above example is completely wrong semantically and visually. Turn off the CSS and all the numbers would blend in into one long string, which would make the calendar 100% inaccessible since you can't even tell where one day ends and another starts.

Read more on that at Dive Into Accessibility [diveintoaccessibility.org]

[moltar]

Here I even coded up the correct table:

<table id="calendar" border="1" summary="..."> 
<caption>Calendar for July 2005 (<a href="#last_day">skip</a>)</caption> 
<thead> 
<tr> 
<th id="mon" abbr="Monday">Mon</th> 
<th id="tue" abbr="Tuesday">Tue</th> 
<th id="wed" abbr="Wednesday">Wed</th> 
<th id="thu" abbr="Thursday">Thu</th> 
<th id="fri" abbr="Friday">Fri</th> 
<th id="sat" abbr="Saturday">Sat</th> 
<th id="sun" abbr="Sunday">Sun</th> 
</tr> 
</thead> 
<tbody> 
<tr title="week 1"> 
<td headers="mon">1</td> 
<td headers="tue">2</td> 
<td headers="wed">3</td> 
<td headers="thu">4</td> 
<td headers="fri">5</td> 
<td headers="sat">6</td> 
<td headers="sun">7</td> 
</tr> 
<tr title="week 2"> 
<td headers="mon">8</td> 
<td headers="tue">9</td> 
<td headers="wed">10</td> 
<td headers="thu">11</td> 
<td headers="fri">12</td> 
<td headers="sat">13</td> 
<td headers="sun">14</td> 
</tr> 
<tr title="week 3"> 
<td headers="mon">15</td> 
<td headers="tue">16</td> 
<td headers="wed">17</td> 
<td headers="thu">18</td> 
<td headers="fri">19</td> 
<td headers="sat">20</td> 
<td headers="sun">21</td> 
</tr> 
<tr title="week 4"> 
<td headers="mon">22</td> 
<td headers="tue">23</td> 
<td headers="wed">24</td> 
<td headers="thu">25</td> 
<td headers="fri">26</td> 
<td headers="sat">27</td> 
<td headers="sun">28</td> 
</tr> 
<tr title="week 5"> 
<td headers="mon">29</td> 
<td headers="tue">30</td> 
<td headers="wed">31</td> 
<td headers="thu">&nbsp;</td> 
<td headers="fri">&nbsp;</td> 
<td headers="sat">&nbsp;</td> 
<td headers="sun" id="last_day">&nbsp;</td> 
</tr> 
</tbody> 
</table>

[D_Blackwell]

moltar - Thanks for your comments. You have correctly surmised that there were other issues as well. Actually, I dropped my own tabled calendar when working up the new design. Visually it came out very well. As for accessibility, it's not very friendly. The client doesn't care one way or another. It's my own interest, and I have a free hand for these things. Your code does point up a couple of things that I was missing originally, so I'll have to take a closer look at promoting ease of navigation through the table.