Re: QBullets (was: Accessible HTML slideshows)

At 02:48 p.m. 07/02/98 EDT, Lloyd G. Rasmussen wrote:
>  I agree that textual links are preferable for a number of reasons.  
>But I applaud the fact that these bullets, as distributed, have 
>descriptive names.  A blind web page developer, without knowing what 
>they look like, can put them to use.  If a limited set of these icons 
>came into wide use, screen reader graphics dictionaries could 
>automatically read the labels based on their checksums.

KLB:
But a blind web page developer could also put TYPE= and REL=
and REV= attributes to use, too. :)  And they have the advantage
of using some of the "give more information" features of HTML
4.0.

TITLE=, likewise, can be used for this purpose.

>And Lynx 2.8, 
>with the verbose images option activated, can already read them, as 
>shown in the insertion below.  This is a far cry from pages I've 
>visited lately which contained links named button1.gif through 
>button13.gif.

KLB:
Well, this is a different question, I think; one problem is that
in the examples you quoted from the page (in Lynx 2.8), I don't
really know if they're images, icons, or what.  I have no way
of knowing that [picture.gif] is supposed to be "this is an 
indicator that you'll see a picture" versus "this _is_ a picture
and provides no information about what's at the end of the
link."

Consider these examples:

QBullets:

   <A HREF="kynnpic.gif">Kynn Bartlett</A>
   <IMG SRC="../images/qbullets/picture.gif">

   Explanation:

   This is a link to a picture of Kynn Bartlett, because there
   is a QBullet after the link.

A different scenario:

   <A HREF="http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/">Kynn Bartlett</A>
   <IMG SRC="picture.gif">

   Explanation:

   This is a link to Kynn Bartlett's home page, beside a picture
   of Kynn himself.

How do they display?

Both would look like this:

    _Kynn Bartlett_ [picture.gif]

Thus, there's no difference in how your Lynx 2.8 handles it, and
you don't know whether or not the link goes to a picture of me,
or goes to my homepage and is beside a picture of me.

To link to a picture of me without QBullets, I suggest the
following:

    <A HREF="kynnpic.gif" TITLE="Picture of Kynn"
       TYPE="image/gif">Kynn Bartlett</A>

To have a link to my homepage, beside a picture of me, you should
really do something like:

    <A HREF="http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/" TITLE="Kynn's Homepage"
      >Kynn Bartlett</A>
    <IMG SRC="picture.gif" ALT="Picture of Kynn"
      LONGDESC="pics/longdesc/picture.html">

In a reasonably sophisticated browser that handles HTML 4.0,
these two should never display the same, should be unambiguous,
and should utilize the TYPE and TITLE attributes.

Of course, no such browser exists, yet. :)

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
Vice President, Marketing and Outreach, HTML Writers Guild
  http://www.hwg.org
Education & Outreach working group member, Web Accessibility Initiative
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Received on Thursday, 2 July 1998 15:16:21 UTC