Re: Direct formatting STYLE attribute

Scott E. Preece (preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com)
Thu, 7 Dec 1995 13:54:45 -0600


From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
|
| Scott Preece wrote:
|
| >Example: I have a table presenting the results of a scientific study; I
| >want to call out three pairs of columns to talk about in the text, by
| >presenting them in three different background colors.
|
| Are they really just "red," "green," and "blue?"
|
| Or are they CLASS="first_example", CLASS="second_example",
| CLASS="third_example". The latter is quite useful to someone reading your
| paper through a speach synth. The former is not.
---

That's an interesting question. In the example I'm hypothesizing, the names are actually meant to be irrelevant - say they are results from three randomly selected samples. I don't think naming the class would be helpful, since the text reference to the sets of olumns would not use the class name. One could also argue that where the styling is used to convey a specific typographic impression, giving the styling would be more useful to the visually impaired reader than giving an arbitrary name to the styling, since the reader could then visualize the appearance of the material.

I'd be interested in hearing more about how a browser would drive a speech synthesizer - what elements or attributes would be spoken?

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
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