[Irl-dean] Accessible tag cloud markup

[Colm McBarron]

Hi All,

We've been asked to create a tag cloud[1] for a client of popular  
search terms on their site - 'what people are searching for', we've  
got a pretty decent algorithm to generate the cloud and weights,  
counting in both frequency and date/time of search. The issue I'm  
having is with marking up the tag cloud, we've come up with 2 options  
so far.

An ordered list (since the cloud is always sorted alphabetically),  
but there is no way for a screenreader to acknowledge that one item  
weights more than another. A help here might be to use some hidden  
text before the tag like: 'popular' or 'very popular' but coming up  
with 10 levels of this could prove a task on it's own!

Headings (there can be any number of 'levels' of font sizes) -  
they're not going to be logical - the sequence could be h4, h1, h2,  
h6, h3, h3 etc.

Has anyone got any thoughts on what markup would be best to use?

All the best,

Colm



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_Cloud