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Re: The buttons verses links debate

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jan 25, 2013 4:45PM

<< I have always felt that buttons are actions and links are things to take you to places.>>

Wait. Wait.
This conflicts with the marketing, public relations, advertising, and publishing goals of nearly every website out there.

WCAG is fairly limited in what it calls a "button" — a submit button or radio buttons, both of which are in forms. But to web developers, "button" means anything graphical that I want the user to click.

If a web manager wants to highlight a new product, he'll make a button-like graphic that catches sighted visitors' eyes and encourages them to click and navigate to a webpage about the product. It's a fancy graphical button that takes the user to a new page on the website, so by your definition, this button acts like a link. Same thing about the Twitter and Facebook buttons common on webpages.

I could just as well design a website with a link that submits a form, rather than a button that submits it. It might not be the convention to do that, but I can do it.

So in web development, a discussion like this comes down to splitting hairs over the semantics between the words "button" and "link."

Is this, really, what we want? Do we, the accessibility community, want to alienate marketing directors and web developers by preventing them from using "buttons" as links to their internal pages or to Twitter pages because of how we've defined those 2 words?

Doesn't WCAG 2.0 gives us the guidance we need? Have meaningful text that defines the purpose of the link, whether that link is in the form of a button or text. If it will submit a form, tell the user. If it will take them to a new webpage, tell them.

Maybe WCAG can improve on how we notify users about the difference between "an action that will take place" and "navigation to someplace new," but if we redefine the words "button" and "link" for web developers, we'll win a skirmish and lose the war.

As a former editor, I could easily argue that "taking you to a new place" is just as much an "action" as submitting a form.

—Bevi Chagnon