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Re: Buttons and label tags

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 10, 2005 8:23AM

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, kieranmobrien wrote:

> > Besides, it would violate the
> > specific requirement that no two links shall have the same link text on a
> > page if they point to different resources.
>
> Which specific requirement are you referring to? Is it a WCAG
> guideline? Or is it just the 'right thing to do'?

Checkpoint 13.1 in the WCAG guidelines says:
"Clearly identify the target of each link."
and points to the HTML Techniques document, specifically part
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text
which says, among other things:

"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."

Admittedly it then says that if you do have identically named links
pointing to different targets, "distinguish the links by specifying a
different value for the "title" attribute of each A element". But this
really doesn't help much. Support to the "title" attribute is not
universal, and it is of poor quality. For example, when constructing a
list of all links on a page, what should a browser do with "title"
attributes? They are by definition advisory titles, not primary content.
A good-quality browser could use link texts in the list but distinguish
identically named links by their "title" attributes. But I'm afraid this
would still be clumsy, and I'm afraid browsers aren't that clever.

So the principle "Clearly identify the target of each link"
more or less implies that links should have different link texts,
unless they are really duplicates. In fact it implies a bit more:
link texts should be different in a manner that makes it easy to
distinguish them from each other.

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