Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx and interactive parts of css

[Chuck Houpt]

I think it might be worth revisiting the original goal of 
accessibility, because its at the heart of the problems your page is 
encountering.

Accessibility is usually only about making a page useable by people 
with disabilities.

However, there is a more important, wider concept of accessibility 
that includes issues like: search engine indexing, machine 
translation, semantic text analysis, etc.

For example, most search engines will only see the HTML text from 
your page, and ignore CSS (just like Lynx). As a result, your page 
would be poorly indexed, because the text is chopped up by the 
footnotes. See:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo

On the narrow issue of screen readers (speech synthesis), you 
mentioned that your page works fine, but the handling of 
display/visible properties varies a lot, so this is also problematic:

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ScreenreaderVisibility
http://www.access-matters.com/screen-reader-test-results/

All these wide and narrow accessibility problems are caused by the 
way the text of your page is organized. The problem isn't just with 
Lynx, but also Google, Yahoo, Systrans, etc.

Lynx is the browser that really puts the T back in HTML - its all 
about the Text. What Lynx is telling you is that the text of your 
page is malformed, in the sense that it doesn't look like normal 
human language text from a book or newspaper.

CCS's hover, visible, and float are cool features, but if using them 
requires mangling the text of your document, its best to find other 
tools (for example, JavaScript).

- Chuck