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Re: Identifying link targets

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 21, 2004 2:09PM

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, darrel.austin wrote:

> > No, the TITLE attribute should be regarded only as an optional hint,
> > since this is how it has effectively been defined and implemented.
> > The correct solution is to different link texts for links pointing to
> > different resources, as required even by accessibility guidelines.
>
> Fair enough, but I do think this is one of those areas where AT
> accessibility clashes with non AT usability.

Sorry, "AT" is inaccessible to me... too many meanings for the
abbreviation. I guess however that you mean "assistive technologies". But
I wasn't discussing that, actually; I referred to both "usual" and
"unusual" user agents.

> Going back to the PDF vs. DOC
> issue, my page would end up looking like this:
>
> PDF: Petition for Appointment of Guardian of the Person/Conservator of the
> Estate
> DOC: Petition for Appointment of Guardian of the Person/Conservator of the
> Estate

Maybe, though it would be more logical to put "PDF" and "DOC" _after_ the
title proper. After all, it's a matter of data format, not content.

And when you offer something in DOC and PDF format only, you are already
in the inaccessible side. (Today I had to boot my computer twice due to
my being to fast in following links to PDF documents. And I'm a relatively
non-disabled user using a vanilla Windows system with vanilla additional
software.)

But if the options are not putting something onto the Web at all and
putting it in PDF and DOC format, I think we would vote for the latter.
Especially since for _some_ material, there's no feasible option of using
an accessible data format. (Mostly PDF-only, or DOC-only, or
PDF-and-DOC-only publishing is just a symptom of not understanding the
basics of usability and accessibility. I'm especially thinking about the
governmental organizations that keep publishing papers that nominally
preach accessibility to others and that are only available in PDF.)

Anyway, you are already in a less than optimal situation. Nobody can
reasonably expect the result to be perfect in all ways. But making the
linked resources name (title) the link text you gain quite a lot, even in
usability. Consider the "normal" user who moves the mouse over a link and
sees the link text change (color change, removal of underline, or
whatever). This is very useful feedback for checking, without much
noticing, that you hit the right link. Compare this with using "PDF" or
"DOC" as link text, for lots of links.

But there's yet another approach:
- put links to the PDF versions on one page and links to the DOC
versions on another; naturally you then use just the names as links,
and you have some general note on the format at the start
- naturally link the two documents to each other
- and the relative main page could contain links to the two pages,
or it could _be_ one of them if you wish to make one format or
another the preferred, or default, data format
- and that page could contain whatever general explanation you like
about the two formats and their relative merits, and information
to users who cannot use either of them (like "call us at - -").
This may result in a need for an extra click or equivalent to get to the
page with the right format, but it makes things simpler and cleaner.
Quite probably, each user, in each browsing situation, wants to select the
data format first, instead of downloading one document as PDF, another as
DOC (which is possible in my scenario, too, just a bit clumsy).

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