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Re: Indicating a non-html link

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 28, 2003 11:41PM

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, oecih wrote:

> I dont have a screenreader myself but as I read in
> http://diveintoaccessibility.org/ a screenreader recognize the title
> attribute, which works as an equivalent for an alt attribute on an
> image link.

There are many different screen readers and other software that is used to
access Web pages in different ways. I don't think we should rely on the
title attributes being presented, or even available, to users. The title
attribute specifies, by definition, an advisory title. It could be
characterized as "nice to know" information, not relied upon.

> <a href="the_2003_annual_report.pdf"
> title="some description about the file - PDF file (123 Kb)">The 2003
> Annual Report</a>

As I wrote earlier, I would put information like "(in PDF format)" after
the link, or inside the link text (in cases where the same document is
made available in different formats, so that the format indicator is
needed to make the link texts different). Whether the size information is
needed is debatable, and depends. Not all people even know what "Kb"
means, and actually many people think that "b" means bits, not bytes.
I would mention the file size only if it's exceptionally large; and
123 kilobytes isn't large for a PDF file.

The title attribute could be used for other purposes, like giving an
expanded version of the name of the linked document.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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