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RE: title attribute of anchor tag

for

From: Lee, Samson (NIH/NIDCR)
Date: Feb 19, 2004 11:26AM

Your CSS trick is pretty neat. The reason why I have this thing going is
that I don't have enough space in the text link area, so I'm calling the
links like Figure 1, Figure 2, and etc., and when you mouse over these links
javascript brings up their associated images on the other part of the page
to give titles/descriptions of those figures. Initially I was happy to hear
JAWS reading the anchor tags' title attribute values, but now I'm thinking
that's not good enough since it is ignoring the words of actual text links
(hence it's not providing the equivalent information). Anyway I'll probably
go with the second option... I can't think of anything better than that.
Thank you!

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Bohman [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 12:22 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: title attribute of anchor tag


As far as the title attribute is concerned, Home Page Reader 3.02 (and
greater) can access the title attribute by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + F1.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any way that HPR can be set to just
simply read the title on links (does anyone else know?). The keyboard
combination mentioned above is definitely unfriendly.

Also, I didn't realize it, but I had been using an outdated version of
HPR on my own computer. I had version 3.002. The current version is
3.021. That would explain why I wasn't able to hear the title attribute
no matter what I did, until I upgraded my HPR. If there are HPR users
out there, they may or may not have the latest version. (Free HPR update
available at
http://www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr3upgrade.html for
current HPR 3.0 users)

Still, most people who need screen readers don't use HPR. Most use
either JAWS or Window Eyes, or some other full-featured program. Home
Page Reader only reads Web pages, email, and a few Web-specific programs.

With that in mind, the title attribute will probably be sufficient for
most of your users. However, to guarantee that all users can access the
extra information, you might have to resort to some sort of a hack.
Possibilities include:

1. making the link an image, so that you can use the alt attribute
2. using CSS to place the extra text above the visible area on the page
(explained below)
3. inserting a 1px by 1px image after the text link and putting the alt
text there

None of these are ideal, and you may decide to stick with the title
attribute, but these are at least options to consider. If anyone else
has any better ideas, let me know.



Code for option 2:

In the style sheet:

.hide-text
{
position: absolute;
left: 0px;
top:-100px;
}

In the XHTML:

<a href="whatever.htm">Link text <span class="hide-text">this text
further explains the link text</span></a>

End result: the explanatory text is placed 100 pixels above the top of
the page, thus rendering it "invisible," but it is still read in context
by all screen readers, and the text is visible (and in the correct
context) when style sheets are turned off. It's a hack, but it works.


Lee, Samson (NIH/NIDCR) wrote:

> Yes, I'm swapping images somewhere else on the page and the link itself is
> text.
>


--
Paul Ryan Bohman
Web Accessibility Specialist/Project Coordinator
WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
www.webaim.org
Center for Persons with Disabilities
www.cpd.usu.edu
Utah State University
www.usu.edu




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