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Thread: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)
From: Mary
Date: Mon, Mar 19 2007 10:30AM
Subject: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
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I recently saw the following assertion: the "title=" attribute is accepted practice for providing accessibility support and provides users with information as an alternative to the use of color.
While I do not claim to have deep accessibility knowledge or insight, I've been working with web accessibility for a few years now and this is new to me. I would very much appreciate comments about this practice from this list.
Thanks very much,
Mary Utt
From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Mon, Mar 19 2007 10:50AM
Subject: Re: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
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Mary quoted someone saying that:
> the "title="
> attribute is accepted practice for providing accessibility
> support and provides users with information as an alternative
> to the use of color.
I don't believe that's a satisfactory solution in general, there are to
many user-agents and circumstances where a title would not be noticed.
Also, the spec for the title attribute is basically for 'extra'
information, if they are suggesting it is there for accessibility
purposes, I would assume it is for required/core information.
I think the colour aspect is something of a red-herring, although it is
aimed at one specific audience, there is no reason to think that those
with colour blindness would have any more or less reason to notice a
title attribute.
Kind regards,
-Alastair
--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
Nomensa Email Disclaimer:
http://www.nomensa.com/email-disclaimer.html
From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mon, Mar 19 2007 11:20AM
Subject: Re: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
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Mary wrote:
> I recently saw the following assertion: the "title=" attribute is accepted practice for providing accessibility support and provides users with information as an alternative to the use of color.
>
> While I do not claim to have deep accessibility knowledge or insight, I've been working with web accessibility for a few years now and this is new to me. I would very much appreciate comments about this practice from this list.
Simple answer: there is no simple answer. Title attribute on what? If
it's on an element that not focussable via keyboard, I believe
screenreaders won't read it out. Even if it's on a link or similar, it
depends on specific screenreader settings. And for sighted (but possibly
colour blind) users that rely on keyboard navigation, title is never (to
my knowledge) exposed (i.e. no browser generates a tooltip or similar if
the user isn't using a mouse).
It depends on context, but in many cases I'd say that assertion is
false. You'd need to give a specific example here for a more authoritive
answer, I think...
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mon, Mar 19 2007 11:30AM
Subject: Re: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
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On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Mary wrote:
> I recently saw the following assertion: the "title=" attribute is
> accepted practice for providing accessibility support and provides users
> with information as an alternative to the use of color.
Can you cite a source? It might be useful to know where such claims
emerge.
Anyway, it's pure bogus. Someone wants to turn accessibility into a simply
manageable technical issue, tell others to write some magic code, and
behave as if they had solved the problem.
There are several reasons why title attributes aren't particularly useful
in general, thought they might be nice extras at times to some people. As
a purported solution to accessibility problems, they work _against_
solving the problems, since they make people write those attributes and
forget the problems, without having accomplished anything significant.
To begin with, the assertion apparently postulates the use of special
browsers that actually read title attributes, at least by user request.
This covers less than one per cent of users and ignores the vast majority
that uses common graphic browsers.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
From: Mary
Date: Wed, Mar 21 2007 7:40AM
Subject: Re: Alternate means of conveying color-coded information
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Thanks very much for your responses to my query about the use of the title
attribute to convey color-coded information. They were quite helpful (and
reinforced my thinking about this technique).
Someone asked if there was a source for this technique. The following links
were cited to me:
<http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_14_adding_titles_to_links.html>;
<http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/attributes/accessibility.htm>;Thanks again,Mary Utt