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Re: Accessible popup ads

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 4, 2004 4:32AM

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, tsb wrote:

> I have a situation where an already accessible site want to do popup adverts
> fired by the body onload event.
>
> Is there any way in which these can be made to be accessible?

Why should they be made more accessible? There's much less nuisance when
they can easily be prevented by disabling or filtering out JavaScript,
using a non-JavaScript browser, or disallowing popups using browser
settings. It might be in the advertizer's interests to make them more
accessible (just as it might be in the advertizer's interests to make ad
images have alt texts that perform the advertizing function), but unless
the advertizers become aware of this, why would disrupt the browsing
experience?

On the technical side, it would be easy to make the adds accessible on
JavaScript-disabled browsers: just add a element containing a
normal link to the ad, or the ad itself.

But this would cover just part of the field. For browsers that have
JavaScript enabled but popups disabled, you might try to open a window and
test whether it succeeds. If it fails, you could do document.write() to
insert the ad or a link to it. But please don't tell anyone I gave such
advice.

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