E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)

From: reply-to:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding;
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 3:22AM
Subject: Buttons and label tags
No previous message | Next message →

Hi all,

I have a page which is like a search results page. Basically you enter
your postcode and you are returned a list of stores within that
postcode. We use a third party provider to do most of the work so are
limited as to what we can mess with.

At the moment it presents the address and has a 'Map' button which
then shows the location on a map. My problem is that I want to
associate the map button with an address. Can I use a label to do
this? What happens in jaws for example if you bring up a list of
links? Will it just say map 10 times? I unfortunately cannot change
the alt text as it is a generic button.

Thanks in advance.

Kieran.

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 4:15AM
Subject: Re: Buttons and label tags
← Previous message | Next message →

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, kieranmobrien wrote:

> I have a page which is like a search results page. Basically you enter
> your postcode and you are returned a list of stores within that
> postcode.

I'd like to refer to my treatise on the accessibility of search result
pages: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/qdfa.html
It especially emphasizes the need for making the most relevant information
(such as the total number of hits) appear most prominently, and appear
first, in the search results. It is also essential to keep the results
page simple and to make navigation to the next page (in case the
results are divided into several pages), as well as from one hit to the
next one on a page, easy and simple.

> We use a third party provider to do most of the work so are
> limited as to what we can mess with.

That can be a serious limitation. It's hard to say anything more specific
without more specific information about the situation.

> At the moment it presents the address and has a 'Map' button which
> then shows the location on a map.

Why button? A link would be a more natural approach. Is there any reason
not to make the address itself a link? Links are generally more flexible
and more accessible than buttons. Buttons should normally be used for
actions that submit some data to some processing or involve an action
like ordering something.

> My problem is that I want to
> associate the map button with an address.

If they are on the same line, on which there is nothing else, the
association is rather evident.

> Can I use a label to do this?

In principle you could, if the button is an element.
But it seems that the button itself is an unnecessary complication.

> What happens in jaws for example if you bring up a list of
> links? Will it just say map 10 times?

A sample URL would help here. But surely if you have list where each item
consists of some text and some element for example,
then any normal linear presentation has to repeat the latter after each
text of an item.

> I unfortunately cannot change
> the alt text as it is a generic button.

What alt text? If it is an image submit button, then it needs an alt
attribute, along with some other attributes. But the practical impact is
relatively small, since if you cannot see the button image, the odds are
that you can't see the map either.

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

From: reply-to:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:references;
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 4:51AM
Subject: Re: Buttons and label tags
← Previous message | Next message →

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 13:16:17 +0200 (EET), jkorpela wrote:

> Why button? A link would be a more natural approach. Is there any reason
> not to make the address itself a link? Links are generally more flexible
> and more accessible than buttons. Buttons should normally be used for
> actions that submit some data to some processing or involve an action
> like ordering something.
>

Personally I think the button works quite well, apart from the obvious
limitations. I don't think a link on the name of the store would be
intuitive enough. It's hard to say without seeing an example.
Unfortunately it is a secure site so I can't give out a URL.

>
> If they are on the same line, on which there is nothing else, the
> association is rather evident.
>

My issue with this is with people using speech browsers. If they tab
to the first link i.e. the map button and then tab again to the next
map button, it is quite awkward for them to know which relates to
which.

> > Can I use a label to do this?
>
> In principle you could, if the button is an element.
> But it seems that the button itself is an unnecessary complication.
>

Sorry I should have been clear by my use of the word button. It is not
a form element but rather an image (shaped as a button) with a href,
hence it has alt text and would therefore appear in a list of links.
So I still have a dilemma of associating each href with its
appropriate result.

Regards,
Kieran.

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 5:16AM
Subject: Re: Buttons and label tags
← Previous message | Next message →

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, kieranmobrien wrote:

> Personally I think the button works quite well, apart from the obvious
> limitations.

There are many more limitations than what people might see as obvious.
I could list down about a dozen different limitations.

> I don't think a link on the name of the store would be
> intuitive enough.

It might be unintuitive that the link points to a map. But such things can
be briefly explained before the list of links. Besides, there's the option
of putting an icon similar to a button and suggesting "this points to a
map" after the link, e.g.
address here
(You could also use alt="(map)" for example, but I don't think people
using speech browsers would like to hear that for each link.
Rather they would like to hear the information before the list.)

> It's hard to say without seeing an example.
> Unfortunately it is a secure site so I can't give out a URL.

Sorry, you lost me there. How is it hard to say to _you_, then?
Besides, "secure" normally means SSL encryption (https) in contexts like
this, and it does not mean restricted access. If it's really for limited
audience, then I guess there's no other way to get specific help with it
than to prepare a copy thereof that has the confidential data removed and
make the copy available to all.

> My issue with this is with people using speech browsers. If they tab
> to the first link i.e. the map button and then tab again to the next
> map button, it is quite awkward for them to know which relates to
> which.

That's one reason why making the addresses links is better. But although
the page might conceivable be used in "links reading" mode, I would expect
that people would normally listen to the content sequentially, so they
would hear the map link right after the address. But this still
unnecessarily deviates from the common link concept.

> Sorry I should have been clear by my use of the word button. It is not
> a form element but rather an image (shaped as a button) with a href,
> hence it has alt text and would therefore appear in a list of links.

It really changes things. In particular, is not meant for use with
links. And if you have essentially map several times, it
the list of all links on a page becomes probably useless, if the list
should really contain the addresses. Besides, it would violate the
specific requirement that no two links shall have the same link text on a
page if they point to different resources.

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

From: reply-to:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:references;
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 6:39AM
Subject: Re: Buttons and label tags
← Previous message | Next message →

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 14:16:31 +0200 (EET), jkorpela wrote:
>
>
> It might be unintuitive that the link points to a map. But such things can
> be briefly explained before the list of links. Besides, there's the option
> of putting an icon similar to a button and suggesting "this points to a
> map" after the link, e.g.
> address here
> (You could also use alt="(map)" for example, but I don't think people
> using speech browsers would like to hear that for each link.
> Rather they would like to hear the information before the list.)

Yes, that was my concern of having the link on the store name. I do
however like your idea of having an icon within the same href as the
store name.

>
> Sorry, you lost me there. How is it hard to say to _you_, then?
> Besides, "secure" normally means SSL encryption (https) in contexts like
> this, and it does not mean restricted access. If it's really for limited
> audience, then I guess there's no other way to get specific help with it
> than to prepare a copy thereof that has the confidential data removed and
> make the copy available to all.

It is SSL encrypted. I did toy with the idea of putting on an publicly
available site but thought I could explain it. Maybe I was wrong ;)

> Besides, it would violate the
> specific requirement that no two links shall have the same link text on a
> page if they point to different resources.

Which specific requirement are you referring to? Is it a WCAG
guideline? Or is it just the 'right thing to do'? I will do it
regardless, I'm just referencing most of my recommendations to
specific WCAG guidelines and will do so for this one.

Cheers for your help!!

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Feb 10 2005 8:23AM
Subject: Re: Buttons and label tags
← Previous message | No next message

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, kieranmobrien wrote:

> > Besides, it would violate the
> > specific requirement that no two links shall have the same link text on a
> > page if they point to different resources.
>
> Which specific requirement are you referring to? Is it a WCAG
> guideline? Or is it just the 'right thing to do'?

Checkpoint 13.1 in the WCAG guidelines says:
"Clearly identify the target of each link."
and points to the HTML Techniques document, specifically part
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text
which says, among other things:

"If more than one link on a page shares the same link text, all those
links should point to the same resource. Such consistency will help page
design as well as accessibility."

Admittedly it then says that if you do have identically named links
pointing to different targets, "distinguish the links by specifying a
different value for the "title" attribute of each A element". But this
really doesn't help much. Support to the "title" attribute is not
universal, and it is of poor quality. For example, when constructing a
list of all links on a page, what should a browser do with "title"
attributes? They are by definition advisory titles, not primary content.
A good-quality browser could use link texts in the list but distinguish
identically named links by their "title" attributes. But I'm afraid this
would still be clumsy, and I'm afraid browsers aren't that clever.

So the principle "Clearly identify the target of each link"
more or less implies that links should have different link texts,
unless they are really duplicates. In fact it implies a bit more:
link texts should be different in a manner that makes it easy to
distinguish them from each other.

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