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Re: Best Practice for linking to documents

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Apr 11, 2011 7:12PM

Birkir,
This is all done at the user level, so as somebody making a page they
cannot force you to see that prompt. They can send the HTTP headers a
certain way, but you as the user can always override them.

--
Ryan E. Benson



On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>>