WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: display text based on co-ordinates on image

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Nov 10, 2005 12:20PM

> However, seeing as this is an accessibility list and not
> necessarily an HTML/JavScript help list, I must point out
> that any content displayed using the overlib method will not
> be accessible to individuals using screenreaders or who
> cannot ir do not use a mouse. I would recommend rethinking
> the method used to present this information if you truly want
> them to be "Navigation help" messages.

I took a quick look and the information in the tooltip will be
accessible to some screen readers, however, the div that is used to
display the information currently exists at the top of the page, and
even if the screen reader can read it (it uses visibility:hidden,
defined inline) the user would not know that the content of the div
changed, and even if they did know they would need to navigate to that
part of the page to read it. JAWS has a feature that helps facilitate
this, but it is still a big pain.

In JAWS, you are notified that there is an onmouseover event, you hit
ctrl+enter to activate it and listen carefully for the line number of
the page code that JAWS says was changed, then hit "J" to jump to the
line number (that you type in) and listen to the changed info. I can't
imagine that too many people do this...

The other issue is that anchor elements are used but aren't always
linked. A screen reader user might click a link and wonder what is
happening, when a sighted person can know that nothing is happening.

It would be good if the functionality of this thing was such that the
info in the tooltip was extracted from the anchor's title attribute, and
it would be good if you could do this on a span for non-linking
tooltips.

AWK