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Re: The buttons verses links debate

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 25, 2013 6:56PM

Hi

The article I quoted (see link above), is a general usability article,
and does not, particularly, have an accessibility focus.
I think the buttons vs. links debate debate is, I believe, a usability
discussion over an accessibility one. Both links and buttons are
perfectly usable by users with disabilities. In some cases the html
control types matter, especially to speech recognition users (I am not
an expert, want to sit down and test speech recognition software for
web browsing to get a better feel for the problems of that end users
group).
The A.T. perspective on this, I believe, is that using an html control
type that is different from the rest helps users navigate forms
quickly. For instance,prev or next being buttons as opposed to links.
I have a very hard time navigating through a check out process, or a
series of forms where I have to look through a long list of links or
headings, or use my browsers find function (for words like submit,
prev, next, check out, complete, or other words on links indicative of
the action I want to perform), to see how to get to the next step in
the process. If next and prev are links, there are hndreds of other
links on the page, so distinguishing these from the rest can be
difficult.
It is doable, and I feel the button vs. link debate should not
necessarily be an accessibility discussion, even if it has some effect
on accessibility.
Cheers
-B
p.s. If you guys have time, definitely read that article. It is a bit
long, the wording is a bit aggressive at times, but it definitely got
me thinking about webpage design and usability, which can be fun,
after all the fact that we are here shows that we are not doing our 9
to 5, but are genuinely interested in accessibility *grin*.

On 1/25/13, Lucy Greco < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> I can't believe that you don't see how a screen reader user interacts with
> tech people you don't know how many times I have been told click the button
> and there is no button it’s a link or even more offal something a screen
> reader can't tell is clickable .
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Chagnon | PubCom
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 3:45 PM
> To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] The buttons verses links debate
>
> << 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
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