508 Compliance - CHM

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Tim Green
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Re: 508 Compliance - CHM

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tonea,
No, it doesn't. If you want to talk about code, please review the code I sent in the second message of this thread:
That is the XML source code of the topic and has nothing to do with the HTML code in the skin or output. They never come into contact with each other. And really, that skin does have a non-scrolling header when it is working correctly. If the header in that skin is scrolling up along with the page then something is broken at your end that is preventing that skin from working correctly -- for example scripting may be disabled.

There are two reasons we have been talking at cross-purposes here (well, three if you include trying to work on this problem with a high fever): The first is that you referred to an image in the body of your text as the "header", which in Help+Manual terminology is exclusively the term used for the heading box at the top of the topic (any headings inside the topic would be a heading, not a header), so that is what I was looking for; the second is that you are tending to mix up the XML source code in the topic and the HTML code in the HTML template in the skin and in the output topic files in the CHM. That is easy to do because they look very similar, but they are actually two completely different languages. The XML is converted into HTML when the project is published and becomes something completely different -- as different as a caterpillar and a butterfly. You cannot tell whether a screen reader can see something by looking at the XML (which is what your screenshot of the code shows) because the screen reader never sees the XML. It only sees the HTML that is in the output pages, and that looks nothing at all like the source XML.

For that you need to ignore the XML completely, because it is irrelevant for that purpose, and look only at the HTML source code in the template and the HTML source code in the output HTML files, which is generated by combining the HTML template with the content of the topic, which has been translated from XML into HTML by Help+Manual and inserted into the template. That can be viewed in two ways: By right-clicking on the page in the CHM viewer and selecting View Source, or by turning off the "delete temporary files" option when you are publishing and then looking at the HTML source files for the CHM in the \~tmpchm folder inside your project folder.
There is no table. :naughty: It says body, header, paragraph, end header. No, I didn't change the code.
You referred to the "header" and in the HTML template and the output HTML pages that is managed with a table. Assuming that the screen reader was not seeing the header (i.e. the title box at the top of the topic) one possible hypothesis was that it was the table enclosing the header in the HTML template that might be causing this. That is why I suggested an alternative to see if that could fix it.
I will say it again. I'm not using a skin because it causes the right pane to dissappear. :frustration: I just wanted to know if you could recommend one to try that might not cause that right pane to dissappear.
Assuming that the "right pane" is the entire topic pane in the CHM viewer, when you say "disappear" do you mean that it is invisible to screen readers, or that you (i.e. a sighted user) are also seeing a blank page? If you are we need to see a demo project from you and a copy of the skin you are using so that we can figure out what is going wrong. You can mail them to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @).
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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