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Re: Links opening in new windows

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Aug 6, 2014 1:29AM

Hi Birkir,

On 6 Aug 2014, at 00:45, "Birkir R. Gunnarsson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> One additional pizza slice for thought.
> If _blank is used in the link to tell the browser that link opens in a
> new window, it is up to the assistive technology to offer user the
> configuration option of reporting that.

yes, please!

> As a screen reader user, I actually find the biggest "change of
> context" to be links to PDF files that are not marked as such when the
> default setting is to display PDF in the browser rather than opening
> it in AdobeReader.

isn't the situation similar in at least some cases when complex non-HT<ML content has to be loaded - Flash, videos, … and of course PDF, especially if it's a complex one.

But again - wouldn't the user agent / assistive technology conceptually be the right place to fix this? Most of the time all the information is in the data provided via the web server.

In general I think that this class of problems is more efficiently solved on the user agent / assistive technology side than on the side of the web server / web site. There are millions and millions of sites, but probably only hundreds or maybe thousands of user agents and assistive technology tools. Once a good user agent and/or piece of assistive technology is available to a user, lots of issues would go away. The only aspect web site developers (in this context at least) would have to adhere to is that the data / content they provide must be 'detectable', programmatically readable in a reasonably consistent fashion (this implies that certain JavaScript based app-like approaches might not work; it would definitely work for PDF files… ).


Olaf