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Re: Support for link Title tag?

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Nov 1, 2004 12:30PM

kelly wrote:
> We would like to
> present these using CSS instead of images with rollovers, in order to
> streamline the code and not use Javascript.

Sorry, but what happens to users without CSS support? And javascript
(which is, from what I can see, still needed to actually trigger these)?
Sorry, not accessible!

You may wish to consider image replacement techniques (having proper
links in the markup, but overlapping/hiding them with graphics).

Read http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/revised-image-replacement/ and make
sure you pay particular attention to comments regarding to the
accessibility impact of the techniques.

But to be honest, my main question would be *why* not go with images?
There's nothing inherently wrong with them (despite the fact that they
don't resize when you simply bump text size up, unless you use something
like Opera which has a proper zoom function which affects everything).

Just having the graphic for the link, though, is a "nice" example of
"mystery meat navigation", and user with cognitive disabilities (hell,
even users without any disabilities - if that's a PC way to put it) may
have difficulty figuring out what they're for.

In short, bad move alltogether. My advice would be to simply go for
links, and possibly add the images next to them via CSS (leave enough
padding to the left, place the image in as a non-repeating background),
or just go with putting proper elements in there (although, as I
said, it's not optimal due to them not resizing and potentially being
confusing).

Patrick H. Lauke
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