What would be wrong with doing this?

[chris_17]

So, I was thinking with the new pseudo classes what's stopping you from creating more interactive hover effects using the content attribute and save you from using <span> to show the hover state etc.

Screen readers would pick up the text in the <p> tags and then we just use the hover and before pseudo classes to show the new text.

Could it be used or is just horribly non-semantic and inaccessible?!?!

Here a JSFiddle anyways with what I mean.

Edit this Fiddle - jsFiddle - Online Editor for the Web (JavaScript, MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Glow and Dojo, HTML, CSS)

Chris

[Alex]

Only possible problem I can see is that hiding text like that might upset Google if you get reported. Not sure, I'd be interested to hear what people think about this.

[Corrosive]

Yes, think I'd agree with Alex. The text is accessible as you say but would be interesting to see how Google sees it. In principal though I think it is the kind of thing we should be at least experimenting with as developers. Not sure about client/production sites just yet though.