WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: Adding a label to search box

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 13, 2006 10:30AM

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, Jim Thatcher wrote:

> WRONG! For form controls title is totally reliable.

I'll buy the statement that it is almost totally reliable for commonly
used speech-based browsing technologies.

Now, what about the rest, constituting more than 99 % of users? If some
instructions are needed, the odds are that many people using visual
browsing will need them, too. They often fail to see the title tooltips,
because their browser does not show them (e.g., because the user clicks
on a button so fast that the timing does not make the tooltip appear) or
because they don't expect anything like that and therefore didn't notice
the tooltip.

The point is that the title attribute is useless as an accessibility
measure. It's a "page toy", which you can use for fun and for extra
comfort to some users. Things might be different if some construct like
title attribute had been part of HTML from the beginning, universally
supported and widely known. It wouldn't be called "title", most probably,
because such an element would deserve to be called differently, e.g. as
"info" (information that is optional in the sense that the user needs to
take an action to access it but obligatory in the sense that user agents
must make it available).

In the present situation, the only way to make information accessible is
to make it normal page content, not an attribute value.

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