- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 14:09:25 +0200 (EET)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Jonathan Chetwynd wrote: > Do you appreciate that keyboard users currently cannot get access to > abbreviation and acronym information. Tooltips are not the way to give essential information. If something is important, it should be said in document content proper. I'm afraid all the talk about <acronym> and <abbr> has made authors forget to present essential explanations, imagining that title attributes would magically handle such things. This is tragicomic, especially considering the rather poor browser support to the markup that is supposed to do miracles. It was time for me to put together my thoughts on this topic, to compose the page "Explaining abbreviations, acronyms and symbols on Web pages", http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/abbr.html > It's not just image links without > labels that would benefit*. Similar considerations apply to image links that are not accompanied (or part of) textual links. The use of an image as a link suffers from several problems even if the <img> element has an alt attribute. I don't believe that universal access to alternate information (such as alt attributes) would solve this problem, though I agree with the idea that such access should be implemented. It is not sufficient that the user _can_ access some information. Anything that is essential should be presented in the main flow of content or via explicit links with descriptive links. Hints and tooltips aren't enough. (Besides, they typically vanish completely in printing - something that people easily forget, despite the fact that we know that people seldom read long pages on screen.) -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 07:09:28 UTC