[Bug 9589] HTML5 should give examples for how to present @title when the user can't use a pointing device

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9589





--- Comment #10 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>  2010-04-26 11:29:48 ---
(In reply to comment #8)
> > If someone is tabbing through the page, might not the tooltip
> > overlay some text they are trying to read? How would you make
> > the tooltip disappear again if you wanted to read the text?
> 
> if the browser provided a keystroke to show the tooltip, could
> they not as easily provide a keystroke to dismiss/re-display the
> tooltip?

True - the problem would be discoverability of the keystroke!

How about this:

   * Browser has Show Next Tooltip, Show Previous Tooltip, and Hide
     Tooltip commands. "Show Next Tooltip" shows the first available
     tooltip from current control focus or, if there is no focus,
     top of document.
   * These commands are mapped to keyboard shortcuts. Could be
     mapped to Command-., Shift-Command-., and Alt-Command-. in
     Safari, for example. (If there are host system functions for
     tooltip manipulation, could use those instead.)
   * For control types where the system UI exposes tooltips on
     focus, Show Next Tooltip is automatically called.

I think exposing on-focus tooltips *automatically* in a different
way to the host system could create a usability problem since
people - even existing keyboard users - will not be familiar with
how to dismiss such tooltips and may assume either the page or the
browser is broken if important content gets hidden.

One possible compromise might be to show the tooltip on focus, then
gradually fade it out? That way keyboard users *know* there is a
tooltip there (meeting the goal of "incidental" discoverability),
and could retrieve it using Show Next Tooltip, but keyboard users who
don't know the Hide Tooltip command would still have access to
anything hidden by the tooltip.

Another possibility might be to include a hint about the keystroke
to dismiss the tooltip in the tooltip bubble. That could be
confusing when tooltip text itself contains hints about shortcuts
for a web app though. Showing a hint in the Status Bar might also
be a possibility - but that's not always visible.

> > Users deserve access to "title" content regardless of whether
> > it's good practice to use it for captions or not, because
> > there's plenty of deployed content using "title".
> 
> in no way am i arguing they do not

Absolutely - I just don't want to see this ticket derail into a
(worthwhile but I /think/ separable) discussion about best practice
for captions. :)

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Received on Monday, 26 April 2010 11:29:50 UTC