MentalX

Top v. Text-Indent

I have just finished recoding the HerbergerOnline services page to clean everything up, and add a ton of accessibility features. One of these features was the inclusion of “Skip to Navigation” for the sake of screereaders. The links are positioned off the page by using absolute positioning. When I went to test on IE7, I noticed that it was generating a horizontal scrollbar along the bottom of the page…nasty. I very rarely care about what IE(any version) does, just so long as the site functions and looks OK. I did, however, want to figure out what was up. So, I loaded up Mezzoblue (Dave Shea) as I knew he used similar functionality and found that his page was creating no such scroller. What’s the deal, yo?

The deal is that I was using text-indent: -9999px;. Mr. Shea was using top: -9999px. This positions up instead of out, and solves the problem. So, lesson learned.