[thelist] Viewing content of HTML redirect

Mon Mar 24 17:47:50 CDT 2008

Julian Rickards scribeva in 2008-03-24 22:24:
> The issue that I am trying to address is a pretty basic one: the HTTP
> redirects are somewhat inaccessible because screen reader software read out
> the content of the redirect page and then read out the content of the final
> page. Ideally, this type of redirect should have been done using
> response.redirect or some other server-type redirect so the "blips" and
> screen reader announcements don't appear.

I think there's some confusion here: response.redirect creates a HTTP 
redirect, but it seems you consider these as two different things.

HTTP redirects should not cause any "blips" nor should any modern user 
agent (screen reader or web browser) render the response body (which 
should contain just a link to the redirected URL).

But I noticed one suspicious thing: the page at 
http://www.keywords.gov.on.ca/mbs/keywords/keywords.nsf/redirect?readform&kywrd=mininglands 
uses a <meta> redirect ("HTML redirect") - but <meta> elements should go 
in the <head> of the document, not in the <body> as is the case here.

So I suspect that any blips or screen reader probs you encounter here 
are due to that wrongly placed HTML redirect - not the properly set HTTP 
redirect (which actually is not correct itself: 302 should be used when 
the requested resource is *temporally* found in the redirected URL - but 
if the resource is permanently in the given location a "301 Moved 
Permanently" is the correct one[0])

.k

[0]http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3