WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Title attributes on images and links

for

From: Oliver Secluna
Date: Aug 5, 2009 3:50AM


Personally I only use title in the following case: the link text (or alt
text of an image) is not sufficient to describe the page being linked
to.

This might be that the link text is "more info" so the title tag would
be "more info about [keyword]".

Another use would be to warn a user that a link opens a new window. In
this case my link text describes the linked page sufficiently, but the
title tag says "opens in new window".

Olly

> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto:webaim-forum-
> <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
> Sent: 05 August 2009 07:48
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Title attributes on images and links
>
> On 05/08/2009 05:47, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
> > SEO, tooltip, other reasons?
>
> From what I understand, it's little good for SEO since it's so often
> abused for SEO keyword stuffing and can easily be discounted by search
> engines.
>
> Good use cases:
>
> * Tooltips for image controls.
> * Titles identifying frames and iframes
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/H64.html)
>
> There are cases where "title" is suggested as a suboptimal alternative
> to other methods:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/H33.html (vs. using text positioned
> off-screen left)
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/H65.html (vs. using "label" elements
and
> positioning them off-screen left)
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-TECHS/H89.html (vs. using text inside
"label"
> or "legend" and positioning it off-screen left)
>
> See also:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/25lf7a [RNIB]
>
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
>