- From: Michael Cooper <michaelc@watchfire.com>
- Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:14:00 -0400
- To: "WAI GL (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Last week I asked members of a few lists, focused on assistive technology users, how they use links and what characteristics of links facilitate or impede their usage. I got responses from about a dozen people, mostly screen reader users. My summary is below. The summary doesn't capture every single comment but does capture the dominant issues raised. Michael RESULTS The links list is useful on familiar pages, or where you know what link you're looking for (especially searching by first letter); but is generally not useful on unfamiliar pages. There was a split preference between the links list vs. tabbing among links, people mostly do one or the other. There were various opinions on using surrounding context to clarify links. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; people reported different success ratios ranging from "usually" works to "usually doesn't". People don't follow links that are ambiguous and can't be clarified by context. Most people like links to convey information about the content of the page and find pages more useful where this is the case. Predominantly this is for inline links. Links are easier to use when authors provide the title attribute and make sure the link text is fully explained. Other things people like to know about links (provided by the user agent): whether it's visited, refers to the same page, protocol (e.g., FTP). Characteristics of links that present problem: * Ambiguous or stock text (e.g., "click here") - many hate though some say they're ok if context available. * Null link text, e.g., a linked image with null or missing alt text. * Long link text * Useless text: things like "logo", auto-generated alt texts, abbreviations * Multiple instances of same link text, especially if the links go to different targets No preference on whether links should be organized into a navigation bar or inline with document content, both are useful depending on context. Navigation bars should have a skip link. Michael Cooper Accessibility Project Manager Watchfire 1 Hines Rd Kanata, ON K2K 3C7 Canada +1 613 599 3888 x4019 http://bobby.watchfire.com/
Received on Wednesday, 13 August 2003 16:14:13 UTC