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Re: Accessible Tooltips?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 11, 2006 4:10PM

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Travis Roth wrote:

> Are there any DHTML methods for creating an accessible tooltip that even a
> screen reader can read?

"DHTML" (a buzzword for HTML+CSS+JavaScript+DOM, now out fashion in favor
of Ajax) is generally a problem, not a solution in accessibility. What
happens, for example, when client-side scripting is disabled to protect
the user from miscellaneous problems?

> By tooltip, I am referring to where extra help text is displayed on the
> screen when a link has focus.

That's a wrong approach. Don't use tooltips for such things. If help is
needed, give it in the normal content or via a normal link. Specifically,
the title="..." attribute for a link should be understood as an extended
link name, not an extra help text. Whether browsers make the attribute
value accessible to the user is a matter of browser quality rather than
anything else - and should not be counted on.

> If no, would it be an acceptable approach to update the web browser's status
> bar with the tooltip content so that a screen reader user could read it
> easily by using the screen reader's Say status line command?

Of course not. The status line is for indicating the browser status. Some
users look at it. Don't confuse them (and hide potentially essential
information) by messing up the status line. Most users don't look at it,
so your message would mostly be lost. As regards to screen reader users,
why would they give such a command? They have not got, and they should not
have, any reason to expect that the document author is sending them some
special messages there.

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