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Re: Pure CSS icons and accessibility

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From: Egan, Bim
Date: May 19, 2010 2:30PM

Hi Iza,

Well the icons do look rather cool, and as you say, do scale well. It
doesn't look as they should be stand alone links though. Using keyboard
navigation I couldn't tell which one was in focus. JAWS does pick up
something, but more often than not it would be more of a hindrance than
a help, JAWS treated it as an empty link, so part of the URL is
announced. In this case, it's just "rathersplendid", but with less
humanly recognisable or long URL references, it could be a real
nightmare.

If the icons were included in part of a visible text link, this would be
accessible, as long as the icons weren't being used to convey useful
information. For instance we all know what an RSS feed is I think, but
if the link were just "feed" accompanied by the RSS icon, this would be
visibly complete, but no good if you can't see the image. Depending on
the web site, "feed" could mean anything.

Other views?

Bim