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Re: Links opening in new windows

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Aug 6, 2014 7:14AM

I agree 100%
Not to stray too far from the topic, so I will not ellaborate further
on this, except perhaps in a different thread, but it must be said
that sometimes we place an awful lot of undue burden on the content
developers and editors, for problems that the assistive technology
vendors would be able to detect/solve.

WE need accessible authoring (content and code), compliant user agents
such as browsers, compliant, smart and innovative assistive
technology hardware and software that takes advantage of this, and the
necessary end user training.
As a community I often get the feeling we try to pin the problems on
the content authors, perhaps because that is most likely to yield the
short-term goal, which is to make the information accessible to the
users, preferably as quickly as possible.

But we must be mindful to try and strengthen all the links in this
chain and build for the future as well as resolving the immediate
problem.

There is a lot of good things going onin that regard, but we can do even more.
Endof off-topic rant, and good day to you!
-B


On 8/6/14, Olaf Drümmer < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>
>
> > > >


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