WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Best Practice for linking to documents

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Apr 11, 2011 5:54PM

One thing that annoys me as a user is that I am never 100% sure from
just browing and looking at a link whether I will open the file or get
a download prompt to download the file to my computer.
I suppose this may be mostly controlled by IE security settings and
file type, for instance when I ahve a .PDF file and click on it it
usually opens, so if I want to download it I have to simulat a right
click and choose "save target as" from the right click menu.
I wish there was a way to make this behavior consistent, or include in
the link whether the file will automatically open or I will get a file
download prompt (in general I always prefer the latter,).
As a screen reader user I find this lack of predictability the most
anoying thing about downloading files.
Including the word "Dwonload" in the link is also g good practice, I
hate links that expand or move you to a different section of the page
whre there is an image that you click, which opens up a new site where
you have to input your email address and there are unlabelled series
of buttons ... and I am not even exaggerating. :)
hth
-Birkir


On 4/11/11, Angela French < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>