RE: Tool Tip behavior

Well,

it is a User Agent technique really...

Charles McCN

On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Bruce Bailey wrote:

  Phil,
  
  I wrote:
  >> I am glad to hear you say that IE is following our (?) recommended
  >> behavior of using TITLE over ALT.  This IS how it works for me with
  >> IE 4.5 and a Mac.
  
  You asked:
  > Where does W3C / WAI recommend TITLE over ALT for tool tips?
  
  Well, I remember that being the consensus reached on the general IG list.
  Perhaps my memory is faulty.  I could not find the old thread when I looked
  for it.  I did not mean to imply that this piece of advice made its way into
  any formal guidelines.
  
  Should this distinction get kicked over to the GL list or is a general UA
  issue that does not have much to do with accessibility?
  
  -- Bruce
  
  
  You continued with:
  > I searched
  > WCAG, ATAG, UAAG, and their respective Techniques and only found a mention
  > in the HTML 4.01 spec:
  > http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#idx-title-1
  > and the HTML 4 Accessibility Note.
  > http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/HTML4-access
  > "The new "title" attribute gives a short description of an image, etc.
  > Graphical browsers frequently pop-up this information when a user pauses
  > over an element with the mouse (tool-tips), but it is equally useful to
  > non-visual browsers"
  >
  > Neither reference recommends a preference order of TITLE over ALT. The
  > UA guideline 2 Ensure that users have access to all content, but not the
  > order.  Perhaps this should be made explicit in the UA guidelines? It may
  > make sense in a visual browser that the title= be render as a tool tip
  > since the user may have access to the visual image.  But I would recommend
  > a screen reader and text browser to render the alt=text first by default
  > and provide access to the title= some other way. After all, in HTML title=
  > attribute is not a WCAG P1 except for FRAME [WCAG 12.1], is a P2 for
  > navigation [WCAG 13.1],  and a P3 for ABBR [WCAG 4.2].
  [snip]
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Sunday, 27 February 2000 07:48:48 UTC