WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Popup windows and JAWS

for

From: James Leslie
Date: Oct 28, 2009 5:45AM


Thanks for the link, it's interesting. Without wanting to sidetrack the
topic too much, I have had a live site for 4 years with a mailto link
that has only received 2 pieces of spam in that time... both from the
same company.
I definitely agree about the default mail client aspect though.
Unfortunately the web being such a young medium means there is no
perfect answer to most of these solutions. Nearly every site I make uses
contact forms instead of mailto links but they suffer from spam through
the form, the only solution we currently have to this is a CAPTCHA,
which have numerous problems of their own, so haven't been implemented.


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Steven
Henderson
Sent: 28 October 2009 11:31
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Popup windows and JAWS

Mailto links ... where to start. Here is a link to some issues that I
agree
with:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/12/06/10-reasons-to-avoid-mailto
-lin
ks/

In my experience, back in university and in corporate work environments,
mailto links would default to a mail client assigned to your system user
profile (usually Outlook) which is fine. Outside these environments
however, it is largely a different story ... people don't generally use
mail clients but instead use web mail such as gmail, hotmail or other
social network hybrids. For those people (generally the people I build
websites for) mailto links result in a blank window - very
unprofessional and definitely not identifying with the change of times
of my target users.

My rule is, if it for internal company web pages, then they are
definitely handy. Otherwise, they don't serve the vast majority of other
users.

--
Transversal Corporation Ltd will be exhibiting at CIPD Annual conference & exhibition 2009 in
Manchester between 17 - 19 November, stand 510.