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RE: questions about accessible pdfs

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 1, 2004 9:14AM

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> Probably, inserting a title="PDF Document" in the <a> may help with at least
> some of that but a PDF is a PDF and if a PDF is always difficult, the title
> won't help with that but at least you are alerted to that.

I don't think that's the optimal approach when linking to PDF document.

After all, the title attribute should specify an advisory title for a
document. I could see the point in title="Introduction to General
Surrealism (in PDF format)" but plain title="PDF Document" is somewhat
questionable.

Explicitly mentioning "(PDF)" or similar (maybe the PDF icon, naturally
with alt="(PDF)") is probably the best way of telling that it's a PDF
document.

Even if a browser supports the title attribute, there is no guarantee that
the user will notice the availability of the information in it.

Technically, an appropriate way to give metainformation about data format
is type="application/pdf" in an <a> element. It's not much used by current
browsers, but at least it's standardized. So it could be used _in addition
to_ explicitly mentioning the type.

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


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