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Re: Title attributes on images and links

for

From: Nancy Johnson
Date: Aug 5, 2009 8:30AM

Open in New Window: Managers love this, especially when the link
takes them away from their site or to open a pdf. It's an uphill
battle to educate folks enough to limit or not use target="blank".

Title Attribute: I came into a site loaded with title attributes on
every form field and link. The clients love it and use it as a tool
tip. I have begun to educate my program manager as to the
limitations of the title attribute as to basically a "mouse" only
event with limited screen reader access and if you use this, the
appropriate length of text, as the text was so long that even mousers
didn't have time to read before it disappeared.

The site actually has one form element the which was dynamically
constructed so the exact form field would repeat if the user clicked
on add another item and so the label for or id would never be unique.
Even though I raised this issue of 508 with my program manager, there
has been no push to correct the construction. I used the "title"
attribute instead. See this article from the W3C on the appropriate
to use the title attribute:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-SCRIPT-TECHS/H65.html

Nancy

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:29 AM, E.J. Zufelt< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> On 5-Aug-09, at 6:16 AM, Oliver Secluna wrote:
>
>> I totally agree with this, and also don't like using 'more info' for
>> link text. However I work in a commercial environment where there is a
>> separation between us technical folk who do the coding and the clients
>> and designers who come up with the interface design. As a compromise
>> solution, where I have no control over the design or text that appears
>> on the page I use title text as a backup for accessibility and SEO.
>>
> E - Not sure if you're aware, but many screen-reader, and keyboard-
> only, users do not have access to the title attribute, particularly
> for links that have some link text. See the RNIB article that
> Benjamin referenced at http://tinyurl.com/25lf7a [RNIB]
>
>
>> Whether this is the best compromise or not, is open to discussion of
>> course.
>>
>>>