WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: please test this method of identifying document icons with hyperlinks

for

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Oct 4, 2011 3:45PM

Angela et al:

At 02:17 PM 10/4/2011, you wrote:
>So a links list reads the links in alphabetical order?
>
>JS: It CAN, but it may not necessarily. In JFW, as only one screen
>reader example, I can choose to read the list of links in either tab
>order or alphabetical order.

Perhaps it'll help to mention that, if I know a site well, I may
choose to navigate the links list by pressing the first letter of the
link I want to activate.

I haven't been following the discussion closely, so I will conclude
by mentioning a little story.

I once worked with folks on a site where they insisted on putting
"opens in a new window" at the beginning of every link. It didn't
matter in how many different ways I tried to explain the problem with
the approach.

Yes, it was "accessibility gone wild," especially since these were
pages of resources that were external to the site I was developing.

As a result of this decision, when navigating the links list, every
link started with o.

My vote is that the name of the document (or the site resource) that
I may or may not want to read is more important to me than the
filetype; I'd like to hear the filetype second.

Jennifer




>So what do others think:
>Icon before the link (reads "Document Type" + "link label") or
>Icon after the link (reads "Link label" + "Document type")?
>
>I would think the latter would be preferable.
>
>Thank you for your opinion.
>
><snip>