# Negative text-indent to hide contents of \<a\> tag

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/negative-text-indent-to-hide-contents-of-a-tag/259451>\
**Category:** web dev\
**Created:** [May 5, 2008, 3:50pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/negative-text-indent-to-hide-contents-of-a-tag/259451 "2008-05-05T15:50:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![shane\_c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3be4f8/32.png) [@shane\_c](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/shane_c)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2008, 3:50pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/negative-text-indent-to-hide-contents-of-a-tag/259451/1 "2008-05-05T15:50:17Z")

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_ **EDIT: Rather than a negative text-indent, which wasn’t working right in IE, I used a “display:none” … So this thread’s title is now a misnomer** _

So I have a nav menu, and the main sections use images rather than actual text, because we need them to be a particular font. The image is just a background added in the CSS (with rollovers), so the actual \<a\> tag in the XHTML doesn’t need to contain anything.

However, for the sake of SEO/accessibility, I added the appropriate text inside some \<span\> tags, and just hid it with a “display:none” in my CSS.

You can see the site [here](http://colossaldesign.net/test/babs/index.php).

So I’m wondering: is this an ok way of handling this issue, or did I take some evil shortcut that Google will frown on?

Thanks 🍺