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Re: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 19, 2007 11:30AM

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Mary wrote:

> I recently saw the following assertion: the "title=" attribute is
> accepted practice for providing accessibility support and provides users
> with information as an alternative to the use of color.

Can you cite a source? It might be useful to know where such claims
emerge.

Anyway, it's pure bogus. Someone wants to turn accessibility into a simply
manageable technical issue, tell others to write some magic code, and
behave as if they had solved the problem.

There are several reasons why title attributes aren't particularly useful
in general, thought they might be nice extras at times to some people. As
a purported solution to accessibility problems, they work _against_
solving the problems, since they make people write those attributes and
forget the problems, without having accomplished anything significant.

To begin with, the assertion apparently postulates the use of special
browsers that actually read title attributes, at least by user request.
This covers less than one per cent of users and ignores the vast majority
that uses common graphic browsers.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/