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Re: Screenreader support for title....

for

From: Paul Collins
Date: Jun 3, 2008 7:20AM

Thanks for your replies everyone and thanks for the links to the
research by Steve.

I probably should have made that more clear; I meant using a title on
a HREF, although it is interesting to see the amount of support for it
on form elements.

I've been ignoring using it for a while due to what I assumed was a
lack of support; and putting all valid information in the ALT tag when
it is a HREF around and image.

It would be good if assistive software came on board and had more
support for the title attribute. Another way around it would be HTML
support for the ALT attribute on the HREF, so you could make your
non-descriptive text links more descriptive.

Or, maybe that's going to confuse things more :)

Thanks again,
Paul




2008/6/3 Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:
> Paul Collins wrote:
>
>> Just wondering what the latest is on this? The title never used to be
>> read out by JAWS, IBM and the like, although that was supposed to be
>> changing. Does anyone have the latest on which popular screenreaders
>> read out both the title and alt attribute?
>
> For some odd reason, the documents I found with simple searches look
> rather old and sketchy. Moreover, the situation surely varies by
> element. For example,
> http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/WE05/forms.html
> is from year 2005 and describes even JAWS 4.02 as supporting the title
> element for several elements (though the <img> element, which you might
> be primarily interested in, is "not tested").
>
> But _some_ optional support (as a user-selectable option) has existed
> for several years.
>
> However, I think the issue is mostly pointless. Why would it matter,
> when we _know_ that the great majority of users won't access the
> information in title attributes anyway? A "normal" user might
> accidentally hit some "titled" element with the mouse and then notice
> the tiny text in a small popup, but mostly nobody sees what you put in a
> title attribute.
>
> If some information needs explanation, explain it in normal content.
> Putting the information in an attribute may look modern and advanced,
> but it's like publishing a book with annotations printed in invisible
> ink that becomes visible in fluorescent light.
>
> Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>