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Re: Best practice for warning users of opening window

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 12, 2005 11:12AM

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Christian Heilmann wrote:

>> Add to that scenario that people like myself block ALL popups (I use
>> Firefox and adblock) and it makes sense to consider your audience.
>
> Which is not an accessibility issue.

It is. One thing that makes people's browsing situations different is the
decisions they make. Accessibility isn't just accessibility to the
disabled. Besides, turning security settings to a maximum may well be a
symptom of a mental disability - though most security specialists think
that "paranoia is good". As content providers, we cannot and we need not
distinguish the effects of sound and recommended paranoia (in the
figurative sense) from those of paranoia as an abnormal state of mind.

> A good popup script should check
> if a window was opened and then not return to the link, otherwise it
> should follow the link in the same window,

Certainly.

> which caters for your scenario, too.

It still does not make the popup thing accessible. If the author has taken
precautions, the popup won't hurt when popups are disabled. But the popup
is still there, and it will hurt when it "works". How much would you like
to distract a user who has severe problems in dealing _one_ thing at a
time? (Actually, any one of us is such a user in some situations.)

> You _chose_ to stop popups, if that is an accessibility issue then I
> could also claim discrimination towards companies that have web sites
> that fail to deliver me their secrets when I turn my monitor off.

You could indeed. Accessible sites are accessible without a monitor, e.g.
using a speech browser.

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