Hidden Accessibility Message Using CSS

Written by David Walsh on Tuesday, January 15, 2008


While I was creating a Woot Checker for myself and you all, I was scanning through the page source code and saw something I had never seen before. I frequently browse the source code of the “big” websites but had never stumbled upon a hidden accessibility message.

Why a hidden accessibility message? Because a hidden accessibility message is shown to the visually-impaired user and no one else. This message also shows your visually-impaired user that you care about their browsing experience. This easy additional can gain you the respect of your users.

The XHTML Code

<p class="accessibility">
Welcome to the David Walsh Blog!  This website was created to reach every audience possible.
Please contact me at david@davidwalsh.name to let me know if I can do anything to further
improve your experience on this website.
</p>

The CSS Code

.accessibility { position: absolute; left: -9999px; font-size: small; }

Remember to place the paragraph at the top of your page’s XHTML code!


Follow via RSS Epic Discussion

Commenter Avatar January 15 / #

Cool tip… I am going to add this to my sites.

Commenter Avatar January 15 / #

Nice tip. I also enjoy browsing the source code of websites and here is another accessibility tip I found useful, if you have an accessibility page:

I have not seen any literature on this however.

Commenter Avatar January 15 / #
Jay says:

I also peruse websites source often. I guess just doing “display: none;” won’t work bc some screen readers ignore that.

Commenter Avatar January 15 / #
CJ Barnes says:

Just make sure if you use this tip that you place it below a “skip to content” link; otherwise screenreader users will have to listen to the same “helpful” accessibility message over and over again, which could get really irritating…

Commenter Avatar January 16 / #
Jay says:

good point CJ

David Walsh January 16 / #
david says:

Thank you for sharing that great idea CJ!

Commenter Avatar January 16 / #
Eileen Tudaleff says:

Slick AND considerate.

Commenter Avatar January 17 / #
Mat says:

some additional improvements i recommend:

.accessibility {
position: absolute;
left: -1000px;
top: -1000px;
width: 0;
height: 0;
overflow: hidden;
display: inline;
}

Commenter Avatar January 19 / #

I have seen potential problems (albeit a few years ago)… A major UK retailer’s informational website had message like this at the top of all its pages and sure enough Google indexed virtaully every single page with this block of text as the page description.

Admittedly, the pages lacked a META description which may have alleviated this problem.

My preference is to simply put this information onto a separate Accessibility statement page and link to it. So at the top of my page I have a skip to content link, a sitemap link and an accessibility statement link – all hidden with CSS.

The great thing about using a class on your hidden element, as opposed to an id, is that you can reuse it on other elements throughout your site.

Commenter Avatar January 19 / #
plasebo says:

Matt is right in his comment. This technique is widely used in wordpress themes to make indexing on google and other search engines easier and more effective. This is a true referencing tool.

Commenter Avatar January 21 / #

I am a keen advocate of using correct tags for website design. ie: h1, h2, h3, p, em, address. ..etc

For the last couple of years i have been using the company logo as a bgimage on the h1, and putting the company name inside the h1, then setting text-indent:-1000em.

This hides the text and just shows the graphic logo for all users, and yet tells search engines and readers who disable stylesheets the company name.

Thanks, Chloe.

Commenter Avatar June 07 / #
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