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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, Paul Collins wrote:

> WAI guidelines 10.1
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-avoid-pop-ups) state
> that you shouldn't use pop ups until user agents allow people to turn
> them off, they also state that you shouldn't change the current window
> without warning the user first.

This is one of the poorly formulated among the guidelines. (Of course,
"poorly formulated" is just a mildly diplomatic way of spelling
"misguided and misguiding".)

The "until user agents..." condition does not belong here. Some guidelines
with such a condition have become obsolete, and indeed harmful to
accessibility, since the condition has basically become false but people
don't know that or authors are using rules or checkers that behave as if
the condition had not ever been there.

In this case, however, the condition should not have been there. Ever. The
accessibility guideline should simply say "don't use popups". They are
irritating even to the majority, and extra risky to many groups of
disabled people.

> Although this guideline could be open to debate,

It indeed is. But think about accessibility, not guidelines. It is so
_evident_ that popups need to be avoided that anyone caring about
accessibility would immediately see this, if he just stopped thinking
about guidelines and thought about people using a page.

> if you were to open content in a new window, could anyone suggest the
> best way of warning the user without making the warning visible on the
> page?

At times we need to make compromises, so let us assume that we have been
forced to use popups.

Then the obvious solution is to include a warning (before the link, of
course, since the document might be "consumed" in a linear fashion).

If you care about accessibility, you ask how to make the warning clearly
observable to all, including sighted users using a visual browser.

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