The Enid Blyton Society

I think you are all missing a vital factor. It depends on what Operating System is being used - i.e. Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8-1 etc. The varying differences people are noticing could easily depend on this.

Dave

Now you're just confusing people even more, Dave!!

(I'm using Mac OS X 10.8.5 and it's all working fine for me)

It's not a case of not working, it's just a bit of a puzzle. As the world's problems go, this pales into insignificance!

Go to Val Biro's thread and Poppy has put up a link. On my laptop, this is in red, stays red when I 'hover' over it, but turns to blue after I've opened the link. Other links that people put up are blue from the start, never appearing red!

This is on my laptop, not a smartphone or a tablet. I run Windows 8.1.

Tony, nothing wrong in being a dinosaur - they were on earth millions of years longer than humans!

Moonraker wrote:
Tony, nothing wrong in being a dinosaur - they were on earth millions of years longer than humans!

And their descendants still live - it is said that hens are closely related to T-Rex.

They are indeed, Wolfgang.

Aren't crocodiles supposed to be the nearest thing to dinosaurs that we have left?

Not really. They certainly existed in the era of the dinosaurs. The closest relative of the dinoaurs today has got to be the iguanas. Birds are definitely descended from them, though. Fairly recently, the remains of a dinosaur with feathers has been discovered.

Dave

I was just wondering about the formatting of some of the book reviews in the Cave e.g.

http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book ... Tree+House" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My screen reader cannot read them. I looked at the source code and saw that there were no paragraph markings in the body of the review. My screen reader can read the titles, headers, captions, etc. (all of which are separated by <p> and <div> codes). But it cannot read the review itself, and was wondering why this doesn’t have the normal formatting that would allow it to be read by a screen reader. I’m guessing the reviews are inserted into the html code rather than converted to html. I can read other reviews, like the Famous Five, and the source codes of those have paragraph divisions <p></p>.

I'm sorry, Liam, but I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about, far too technical for my mind! Having said that it appears to me to be exactly the same as every other book in the Cave, nothing different at all, so perhaps the problem is your end!

For example, this line/heading “Review by Nigel Rowe” I can read/hear. It is enclosed by <div> codes. <div class="dthead"><a name="review">Review by Nigel Rowe</a></div>

Or this from the FF reviews I can read/hear:
<p>The Famous Five are among Enid Blyton's best-loved creations and countless children have gone adventuring with them since the publication of <i>Five on a Treasure Island</i> in 1942, the first of twenty-one full-length adventures and numerous short stories.</p>

But the paragraphs of Nigel’s article itself (and others) are not - it starts with italics codes instead of paragraph codes <p> as does the Famous Five reviews:
<i>Hollow Tree House</i> was first published by Enid Blyton in 1945, by Lutterworth Press, and was illustrated by Elizabeth Wall. Rather like <i>The Six Bad…

I’m not an html expert myself, but that seems to me to be the difference.

I took a quick look at the source code, and yes, there are no paragraph tags, so it's pure text, but it works with browsers because they have a preformating embedded if there's no information available. I'm not familiar with screen readers or the conditions they require to function, so I can't give you any advice how to deal with it .

Which screen reader are you using Liam? I couldn't get Windows Narrator to work at all (couldn't make head nor tail of it to be honest, but that's Microsoft for you!), but I downloaded the free open-source reader NVDA and was able to use that to read reviews in the Cave with no problem. I'm not all that familiar with screen reading software but it doesn't seem to me the HTML encoding would make that much difference.

I'm using NVDA. I can read some reviews in the cave. It's those that don't have the paragraph coding that seem to be the problem. Are you able to read the review of this link:

http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book ... Tree+House" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It reads whatever I hover near with the mouse, so as I move the mouse down line by line it slowly reads the whole review. I'm not sight impaired though, so I have no problem locating the start of each line with the mouse. Do you use the keyboard shortcuts Liam?

I can read most pages by hovering my mouse. It's just some of the reviews I cannot read. I can't explain why it would read some pages and not others. No, I don't use the shortcut keys. I use both a screen reader and magnification program (Windows Magnifier).