Title attributes and accessibility

[Foamcow]

Do title attributes get picked up and read by assistive technologies such as screen readers?

The reason I am asking is that I am working on a site at the moment that I am trying to make as accessible as possible.
It seems to me that without the visual cues given by the design it would be difficult to understand the context of some of the subnavigational elements.
To this end, it would make sense to include headings to explain what groups of links are. However, it seems dumb to do this and then hide them from "normal" browser and they wouldn't "look" right within the design. It would make sense to me if screen readers picked up the titles of the elements that the links were in which would negate the need for additional headings etc, but still imply the correct context to the elements.

Any thoughts? Can't show the site here at the moment unfortunately.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I just fired up our Coedit Limited site, and ran it through IBM's Home Page Reader v3.04 with out-of-the-box settings.

It read all of the title tags on the navigation with no problems.

On the accessibility page of our site, you can find links to other popular (and some free) screen readers - most which offer some sort of trial to let you road-test them first.

Try them out - see what you think. A few words of caution, however.

I randomly installed 4 of them, and after a reboot, my display settings were tweaked somehow (I couldn't put my finger on it) to enhace things for visually impaired people, so you might want to check any installation options carefully.

I also found that some of them had inconsistent behaviour. Sometimes whole chunks of text were missed out on the reading, but that I put down to me not knowing how to drive the software (does anyone ever RTFM?), rather than a problem with the software itself.

Hope this helps,
Dan

Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

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[Foamcow]

Yep I've used some screen reader software in the past as well as some software that applied visual "tweaks" to the OS. They were hard to remove again! lol

I realised after I started this thread that if I simply rearranged my code slightly then the percieved problem went away. It was just a matter of taking a step back and thinking for 10 minutes!

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2