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RE: Lynx and imagemaps

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 19, 2003 11:24AM

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:

> ah yes... the infamous "Until user agents..."

But they promise to keep us informed of the situation:
"Note. The W3C WAI Web site (refer to [WAI-UA-SUPPORT]) provides
information about user agent support for accessibility features. Content
developers are encouraged to consult this page regularly for updated
information."
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#until-user-agents

The page referred to,
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/WAI-UA-Support
says:
"Last modified:
$Date: 2001/08/03 17:46:43 $ "

Time to sigh, is it not? About this issue, that document contains mixed
rather irrelevant notes, including the note that "MSIE 5 (Win98) support
tabbing through client-side image maps when the image map image is
loaded." The checkpoint does not refer to any tabbing. It says:
"Until user agents render text equivalents for client-side image map
links, provide redundant text links for each active region of a
client-side image map."

And as a matter of fact, IE for example, including IE 6, completely fails
to render the alt attribute values of <area> elements. Thus, when the
browser is configured not to show images, or when the image is not
available, or the user cannot see it, the image map is virtually
impossible to use.

To check this, you could use
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/mapalt.html
which contains some image maps, including a map with an intentionally
broken image (to simulate the browser's support to alt attributes).

Hence the time has _not_ come to say that user agent support to image maps
makes the checkpoint outdated. And that time won't come for years, of
course.

> Good thing that the WCAG 2 is in draft eh?

It this a trick question?

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


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