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Re: Best Practice for linking to documents

for

From: Angela French
Date: Apr 11, 2011 4:48PM


Jared - that's something I pulled from my old "code snippets" file. Thanks for the feedback. Since our Contribute users can't get to the code, I need to come up with something easy to implement. I see on Webaim.org this method below where a span tag is used to provide information and hidden of the viewable page. I suppose a similar technique could be used with linking to documents.

<a href="http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/" title="Link to External Site" class="external">Vischeck<span> - external link</span></a>

/* External links */
a.external span
{
position:absolute;
left:0;
top:-500px;
width:1px;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}

a.external:link
{
background: url(/media/template/externallink.gif) no-repeat 100% 0;
padding-right: 20px;
}

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 3:25 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Best Practice for linking to documents

This looks good, except I'd lose the expanded alt text and the <abbr>.
Nobody calls a PDF by it's real name of "Portable Document Format".
Everyone else sees and knows PDF, so I'd just keep the alt text as the more accurate and succinct "PDF". And using abbreviation for KB isn't really useful. If the user doesn't know what KB means, showing them the expanded abbreviation of "kilobytes" will probably only muddy the waters even more.

And very good job in including this important information within the link. We typically see this content immediately after the link, which means it would not be read in the context of the link as screen reader users navigate the page via links.

Jared