Yahoo! In Hidden! Text! Spam! Shocker!

How on earth did you discover that Nick?

Classic though, almost made me cry with laughter!

Haha, so same-colour text CAN be legitimate. Listen up SEs.

to the Financial Times

Maybe they should write another article, LOL

and the style that goes with it of

Is definately one of those times that I feel that practices like this are legitimate. It is almost definately designed to assist screen reader software, user's of which are a minority.

At least in the UK (and I am sure elsewhere) accessability is a legal issue, not to mention moral one, but the facts remain that the %age of users that will need the extra assistance that Yahoo are offering is small and the costs of which will be high so a balance between those that require the assistance and those that don't has to be met commercially.

I feel this is a sensible way to deliver the balance.

Hypocritical of Yahoo? Sure.
Sensible of Yahoo in the commercial, legal and logistical sense? Definately!

Actually I think Yahoo should be applauded, and to my knowledge Yahoo (or indeed Google) have never said that all hidden text is evil, that was some other group of moral guardians I believe, they simply say it's normally frowned upon.

Although I'm not quite sure why they didn't feel able to use standard text for it.

But it was just too wonderful to pass up commenting on :)

Here's a Direct link if you want to edit it in.

I know a guy who runs a movie related website. People wanted to talk new movies but he didn't them want to give away "spoilers". He came up with a style called "spoiler text" which was dark blue text on a dark blue background. So most people would see blue strips, and if they wanted to read the text they just highlighted it. It's perfect for everybody except the SE's.

There are far better ways to hide spoilers and allow for easy access than using the same color for fg and bg.

Should be the new excuse for hiding content :)

Much respect to Yahoo for offering real flesh and blood assistance to the blind.

This prctice has spread to many other forums now. It's brilliant and I don't care if the SE's like it or not - the conversation is more important.

This is a few days old, but GOOG were in a little hot water with the blind recently - and im sure Yahoo! dont get it right everywhere - it's damn tough to be really blind friendly - and i'd know..

Funny thing is, if that's white on white, it's a bit daft - wouldn't it make more sense to have 'display: none;' - just a picky css piont :)

sorry - I was a muppet about the cloaking bit I was looking at the wrong page, so you might want to adjust that Nick.

I didn't see you mention that until now ???

Anyway, if you were a muppet, which one would you choose to be? I'm sure you have a favourite! (STT)

We could speculate that Yahoo wants one of those cheeky TW members to discover it and then spread the word :^D

Seriously, I'm _glad_ Yahoo addresses visually impaired persons' needs by why not make it part of the content? I don't think it would detract from the message or confuse anyone.

BTW, I can relate to the problem with those "captcha" image boxes (the one in the article Nick linked to)for the visually impaired, because lately I've run across several sites that have a lovely broken image instead of oddball letters/words displayed. Someone needs to come up with a spoken version, for example, to cover all bases, and disabilities - oh, and technical glitches.

...is in fact the best for the deaf/blind.

Spoken versions (nice idea though) mean nowt to them ;)

if they're blind and deaf surely the text reader solution isn't going to help them much either?

I think you can get audible 'captcha's. I've not played with them yet though.

And clearly I'd be Miss Piggy; glamorous, sophisticated and a great right hook. I can't believe you even have to ask me that?!

but of course you know that deaf/blinds often have a braille pad that translates text (i.e. not captchas) to 'sensible messages'...

I think that Yahoo (and people who follow their lead - heheh) are on a roll here.

edited, thanks gw, gurtie