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Re: Opens In New Window

for

From: glen walker
Date: Jul 16, 2018 8:28AM

I like Birkir's recommended text update that says "whereas CSS content can
be used to communicate helpful information about an element it should not
be used for essential information".

In this particular case, the codepen example provides two different
situations (whether intentional or not). The first example with "opens in
a new window" links, I don't consider that "essential" information. It's
nice to know but as long as the link text is sufficient (2.4.4), whether it
opens in a new window may not be critical. (Although one could argue if
there's a visual clue that the link opens in a new window and that visual
clue is not conveyed to AT, then it's a failure. If there is no visual
clue, that could be a cognitive failure. If this were the only issue on
the site, then congratulations. Typically there are higher priority
failures to deal with.)

The second example for footnotes, with CSS turned off, you would only hear
"one" or "two" for the link names and not that they're footnotes. That
could be pretty important. The section of footnotes does have a heading
before it so you might figure out the context of the "one" and "two", but
then you're making users think <https://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html>. When
displaying a list of links (Ins+F7), the CSS content is included in the
link name as documented in accessible name calculation
<https://www.w3.org/TR/accname-1.1/#step2>. (Note, when I link to the
accessible name calculation, I like to use the "step2" in-page reference
because it goes right to the meat of the calculation. In this case, CSS
pseudo classes are discussed in step F.ii.). With CSS turned on, the link
name is "Footnote 1" and "Footnote 2".


On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 7:28 AM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I've filed a WCAG issue to help get this resolved:
> https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/433
>
>