WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Best Practice for linking to documents

for

From: Angela French
Date: Apr 11, 2011 4:18PM

This question is directed to screen reader users primary, but since this groups provides such good conversation, I look forward to hearing from anyone.

I would like to know a best- practice accessibility method for linking to documents such as MS Word documents and PDFs, etc. In the past when I have hand coded sites, I have used the following method:

<a href="http://filepath.pdf">Title of Document<span class="filesize"> [<img style="border:none;" src="/graphics/ /pdfLogo.gif" alt="Portable Document Format" /> 100<abbr title="kilobytes">KB</abbr>]</span></a>

I did it this way to provide both sighted users and screen reader users an indication of the type of document that would be opened and its file size. But this takes getting into the code. I am looking for a way to let content contributors to a site that is managed using Adobe Contribute create effective links to documents. They may be limited to what they can do. So, I'm wondering what do screen reader users need/prefer when linking to a document? If you have an example (either code or URL), I'd appreciate your input.

Thank you,


Angela French
Internet Specialist
State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
360-704-4316
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.checkoutacollege.com<;http://www.checkoutacollege.com/>;