The Underscore Archives

On 10/08/07, Anthony George <anthony.george at teamrubber.com> wrote:
> It can be both, the point is to decide what needs to be made
> important based on the content not just the technique. Some websites
> the name or title of the website will be more important than the
> branding others it won't. The mark-up should reflect this rather than
> always putting the logo in an H1 or not.

Yep - and we've settled on h1 for the homepage, div everywhere else,
because of the overriding principle of h1 being the *page* title. It's
a balancing act, though generally good semantic structure is good for
both accessibility *and* SEO.

> If you make the logo a background image some assistive technologies
> will not know it is there.

I'd like to know how AT reads images ;)

(Clue: it doesn't, which is why we need alt text or AT-friendly image
replacement)

I'm using the off-left (negative text-indent) method; the site name
(which is the *real* content) is perfectly accessible by AT. Just view
source.

> The choice is how important is it to the company / website / user
> that their branding be something they want to know about.

I'm not following you. With the method I used on optics.org, sighted
users see the logo; AT users hear/feel (Braille) the underlying text
(in an H1 on the homepage, div elsewhere). It's exactly equivalent to
using an img element with alt text, *except* you have the option of
targeting different presentation at different types of user agents and
contexts (handheld, print, voice etc). rather than saying "whichever
user agent downloads this document will get our large logo".

> The point is that we need to think why we are doing things and not
> just how.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more, and we've given this a lot of thought.

Tim