WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Using title attribute on non-anchor elements?

for

From: deborah.kaplan
Date: May 2, 2016 9:23AM

On Mon, 2 May 2016, Paul J. Adam wrote:

> Would be nice if the browser developers would make their title tooltips keyboard operable by default!

It would be nice indeed if ubiquitous use cases which can only be
made accessible by knowledgeable developers using JavaScript wisely were
instead made natively available in the browser. It would also be nice if
WAI-ARIA functionality could be natively made available in the browser,
so, for example, something with a role=button would not require a
knowledgeable developer to add JavaScript in order to enable keyboard
functionality.

I keep being told this is a battle I will never win, so I should stop
asking for it. I'm not that kind of cynic, though. Browser
manufacturers can be convinced that having hundreds of thousands of
developers idiosyncratically coding their own solutions and JavaScript
is not nearly as good an idea as actually enabling this
universally-desired functionality in the browser.

I cannot believe that Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai have
stated, "No, we will never expose accessibility functionality in the
browsers for people who are not using assistive technology." Nor do I
believe that the accessibility teams at the browser manufacturers are so
opposed to improving accessibility that "we will never win this
argument" makes any sense.

Deborah Kaplan