Getting information when tabbing around

Jonathan Chetwynd has raised an issue on the Interest Group - how to get
information like text alternatives for images when using keyboard navigation
in a browser.

Although the solution is to fix the browser, this group specialises in repair
tools so seems the place to look for people to help with the work.

I have proposed a rough javascript solution, which could be added via a
transcoding proxy (for example with XSLT in the case of XHTML content) that
changes images from something like

<img src="blah" alt="fred" /> <a href="there" title="the way there"><img
alt="there" src="imagine" /></a>

to something like

<a onfocus="window.status='fred'" onblur="window.status=''"><img src="blah"
alt="fred" /></a>
<!-- I don't know if an a element is enough or if the thing needs to be a
link to make anything highlight -->

<a href="there" title="the way there" onfocus="window.status='the way there -
link to there (http://here/there)'" onblur="window.status=''"><img
alt="there" src="imagine" /></a>
<!-- I have added link title, "- link to" alt value and href together to get
the text. There are probably nicer ways of doing that but I have so far only
spent two minutes thinking about this -->

Note that this only deals in the window status, so it isn't everyone's ideal
solution. In some browsers I believe that the browser can be made to generate
tooltips via Javascript, and then such a script could be used to process a
page and do nice things. I started to look around Mozilla, but haven't solved
it yet (I have a few other things on my to-do list) and I believe that
something like this can be done in IE, but I am not sure of that. Anyone
know?

The thread in the IG that this came from starts at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001JulSep/0232 (it was in the
middle of a thread as recorded by the archives).

Cheers

Charles

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 04:27:22 UTC