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Re: Link labels and APA citations

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Oct 20, 2014 10:25AM

> Those might work for websites, but to the best of my knowledge, we can't do Aria in PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word documents. And controlling link appearance in PDFs is a time consuming nightmare.

You can use the "ActualText" property in PDF to specify a programmatic replacement to the text that is displayed. This would akin to aria-label.

Links aren't very accessible in PPT slideshows with screen reader users -- so having the url displayed in that case could actually be helpful.

For what it's worth this is a generic issue for links in Word and not specific to APA. Word does have a screen tip property that is exported to the title attribute but to my knowledge screen readers don't provide access to it within Word although it is available programmatically it isn't accessibility supported.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Chagnon | PubCom
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 12:17 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Link labels and APA citations

Those might work for websites, but to the best of my knowledge, we can't do Aria in PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word documents. And controlling link appearance in PDFs is a time consuming nightmare.

Keep in mind that WCAG is being applied to all electronic content, which includes office and PDF documents, not just websites.

"Don't make the URL a link."
Won't that confuse sighted users?

-Bevi Chagnon
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-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 9:50 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Link labels and APA citations

> Can we assume that someone reading a research paper with a screen
> reader
will understand from the context of being in the reference section that APA citations are in this format and be ok with it? Is there a way to meet both APA and best practices.

I think there are several ways that this information could be WCAG conformant and remain as it appears in APA format.

Some thoughts include:
1. Make the work title a link and appear as text but appear underlined on focus (has usability implications because it doesn't appear interactive unless focused or hovered). Don't make the URL a link.
2. Use aria-labelledby on the URL to provide an accessible name containing the title rather than URL (has possible implications for speech users) 3.
Claim that the URL itself accurately describes the purpose of the link.
This could be used in many situations where the domain or page name describes the work. Some URLs would be numbers or letters that have no meaning and in these situations this solution wouldn't work.

Displaying the URL has benefits -- but I agree this is something that people need to come together on to discuss and it's not just one side's responsibility.

Jonathan