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Re: Identifying link targets

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 22, 2004 5:57AM

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, kynn wrote:

> > This seems a good compromise but we're aware that it's not quite 100%
> > foolproof in that some screen reader users may have turned off link
> > descriptions.
>
> Then that's their choice. And they don't get the link descriptions.

Maybe they don't have a choice. We know for sure that authors have a
choice

> I also maintain that if you just have "Read more", with NOTHING else,
> you're not violating some cardinal sin.

For a definition of cardinal, ordinal, or some other sin, consult your
local &priest;.

Regarding accessibility, making link texts the same when they point to the
same resource reduces accessibility. It also violates a specific
requirement, WCAG 1.0 clause 13.1,
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-meaningful-links
which is explicitly clarified at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text
as follows:
"If more than one link on a page shares the same link text, all those
links should point to the same resource. Such consistency will help page
design as well as accessibility."
If you read further, you see:
"If two or more links refer to different targets but share the same link
text, distinguish the links by specifying a different value for the
"title" attribute of each A element."
which is an unfortunate addition, but might be read bone fide as saying
that _if_ you have violated the accessibility principles, _then_ you
should at least reduce the damage that way.

> Web pages are NOT meant to be read as a list of links.

That's just your prejudice, and accessibility guidelines explicitly take
the view that pages _may_ be used that way and _are_ used that way.
A list of links is just one form of this; people may also tab through
links, or use a speech browser in "links reading mode".

> They are structured documents,

Yet another prejudice. Structured is not identical with sequentiality. On
the contrary, it's _minimally_ more that mere sequentiality, i.e. a
document that may only be consumed sequentially.

The markup is part of the structure, allowing, for example, the
extraction of links, just as heading markup allows a browser to construct
a table of content from them, or as markup (if it were used
properly) would allow the browser to give the use quick access to terms in
their definitions, etc.

> and treating them as if they are not and structure does not
> matter is as wrong as if you took all the elements and read them
> in order. In fact, doing that makes more sense than reading tags.

You are not consistent with yourself here. Anyway, reading just the
emphasized words is surely one way of looking at a document, especially in
visual browsing. People do that all the time.

> This kind of thinking is dangerous to accessibility because it leads to
> a devaluation of the structured aspects of HTML marked up text.

On the contrary, structural approach means that an HTML document can be
processed and "consumed" in a multitude of ways, instead of mere
sequentiality (which is, of course, an important mode too).

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