Hi all:
does anyone have experience of the accessibility or otherwise of image map
links?

A colleague and I are having some problems using them in accessible pages.

the first problem we came across was that Dreamweaver places all the image
map code at the bottom of the page regardless of where the images are
actually supposed to appear this resulted in Jaws treating the page as if
all image maps were collected together in a list at the bottom of the page.

Solution manually move the code to the correct area in the page.

However that's not the end of it, we have a student beginning a course next
month who (of his own choice) uses the Hal screenreader.
the technical info for Hal says that image maps are supported however we
can't get it to recognise ours at all.
Am currently awaiting reply from Dolphin systems on this one.

has anyone had luck using image maps with Hal?

and does anyone have more general comments about the access or otherwise of
image map links other than the fact that they obviously aren't accessible to
people using text only browsers such as Links?

As an aside we noticed that for some strange reason Dreamweaver placed the
code for one of our images inside the table tag and the code for the second
outside of it. Changing this and even removing the table altogether made no
difference to how jaws handled the imagemaps though.

thanks

Adrian Higginbotham,
SURFACE
Salford University, Research Focus on AcCessible Environments.
E-mail [log in to unmask]
tel: 0161-2954939
fax: 0161-2955011
sms 278314405199094 this is a text # only it does not accept voice calls.
web: http://www.scpm.salford.ac.uk/surface/