Re: @title's relation to accessibility

sander said:
>.Understood. But is that really something authors should consider?

Authors do regularly take into account and code for inconsistencies between
user agents, should they have to probably not.

If they want to provide information in an accessible manner they should
consider it.

Example: informing a user that activating a link opens in a new window.
if this advice is in the title attribute on a link, no "keyboard only" users
and many assistive tech users will not be able to access this info.

>If users care, they should bug their favourite browser vendor
>about it.

I don't think it is users that bug browser vendors to fix bugs, it is
usually informed developers.
most users don't know or understand what the title attribute is nor should
they and for users who cannot access the information contained within the
title, how are they to know there is something there (that they cannot hear
or see) for them to complain to the vendors about?

On 03/09/07, Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl> wrote:
>
>
> At 16:17 +0100 UTC, on 2007-09-03, Steve Faulkner wrote:
>
> > Something to keep in mind is that due to browsers lack of support for
> >@title attribute keyboard accessibility , it is of limited use when it
> comes
> >to providing content to users who cannot use a mouse, but do not use
> >assistive tech.
>
> Understood. But is that really something authors should consider? I'm more
> inclined to consider such issues (which apply to more than just @title)
> browser bugs. If users care, they should bug their favourite browser
> vendor
> about it.
>
> It might be that we should somehow say something about this in the spec;
> that
> "UAs should ensure that all content is accessible to all users", but
> obviously that's already too strong to be practical. But I don't think
> that
> *authors* should be encouraged to author for specific browsing situations.
> If
> HTML defines @title for "advisory information", then that's all an author
> should need to consider. They should not consider implementation
> specifics,
> be they keyboard access, or tooltips. (AFAIK it would be perfectly legit
> for
> a UA to always present @title. The only reason they currently 'can' not is
> that most authors expect it as a tooltip, and inline presentation would
> mess
> up their pixel-precise designs...)
>
>
> --
> Sander Tekelenburg
> The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
>
>


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

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