Replacing the -9999px hack (new image replacement) - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily... - 0 views
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NED12 css webdesign hacks image image-replacement text-indent
shared by Vernon Fowler on 16 Sep 12
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My friend Scott Kellum, design director at Treesaver, has now sent me this refactored code for hiding text, which I hereby christen the Kellum Method: .hide-text { text-indent: 100%; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; } Really long strings of text will never flow into the container because they always flow away from the container. Performance is dramatically improved because a 9999px box is not drawn. Noticeably so in animations on the iPad 1.
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Scott Kellum said on 1 March 2012 at 3:41 pm: I went ahead and created a side by side site to test the performance: http://lab.pgdn.us/hidden-text-performance/ @Ethan, This is the best 43min I have ever spent learning about optimizing the performance of my CSS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuMWhto62Eo
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Would be interesting to understand both the SEO and accessibility impacts of this approach.
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Scott Kellum said on 2 March 2012 at 4:06 pm: After much deliberation over here: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/1005#issuecomment-4293007 Jonathan Neal suggested a method using font: 0/0 serif; and things seem to be settling on this — .ir { font: 0/0 serif; text-shadow: none; color: transparent; }
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While I think this is certainly and interesting approach, I have some concerns with the accessibility. In some, if not all, cases when overflow: hidden; hides the content of the element this is applied to from screen readers. In most cases where I use image replacement, I still need the text to be accessible (e.g. call to action buttons set in Gotham). See Aaron Gustafson’s A List Apart article, http://www.alistapart.com/articles/now-you-see-me/. Has anyone tested this with a wide battery of screen readers or other accessibility devices?
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Another note on accessibility: Besides the screen reader problems – people who don’t get images will not see the text too.
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As a few people said already, this does not solve the accessibility problem that comes with text-indent. Worse, it may send the wrong message: “this is new and cool, use this from now!”. As a leader in the industry, I think you should warn people that even if this is “better” in term of performance, it is still a bad solution. Imo, Image Replacement techniques should be evaluated against the problems they solve/address. Fwiw, I wrote something about these challenges a few years back: http://tjkdesign.com/articles/tip.asp </shameless plug>
