- From: John M Slatin <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:19:29 -0600
- To: "Tipton, William" <bill.tipton@hp.com>, <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Bill Tipton wrote: <blockquote> Is there a part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, or earlier that talks about labeling text links? I am looking for something that talks about using both short descriptions and long descriptions as the label for the link, if this is possible. These links do not have images and web pages are done in html. I would like to have longer descriptions so where appropriate users who use screen readers can pick up this longer description. The shorter descriptions would be used for the users who do not use screen readers. I am hoping that the screen readers would only pick the longer description when both the short and long are used. Is this good practice? Is there part of the recommendations that talks about this and gives technical guidance? If so can I have the URL or other pointers. </blockquote> The WCAG 2.0 success criteria that are most relevant to your question are: Guideline 3.2 Level 2 Success Criterion 6, which reads as follows in the 19 November 2004 Public Working Draft: <blockquote> 6. The destination of each link is identified through words or phrases that either occur in the link or can be programmatically determined. [V] </blockquote> For what it's worth, current generation screen readers default to reading screen text for links when present; they can be set to read the title attribute *instead* or (for JAWS, anyway) to read whichever is longer. But I don't know of any screen readers that speak both screen text and the title attributre-- though the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines call for this capability. Hope that helps. John
Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 15:19:30 UTC