Re: title inclusion

It is a useful technique, and belongs in the technique document.

What I believe is in and I often use, is the title on anchors to provide
context or other information that is provided though presentation. Or as
WCAG puts it " content developers may specify a value of the "title"
attribute that clearly and accurately describes the target of the link".
For example, a link may be under the subheading "corporate customers". To
provide this information, and so that non corporate customers do not waist
their time following non relevant links,  add this information into the
title tag.

Try it on a screen  reader, it is great for information hiding.

The HTML techniques document does give the example of using title for
abbreviations acronyms and framesets. More interestingly it also recommends
it for tables,  to describe the nature of the table in a few words when a
caption is overkill. -  Same idea

all the best ,

Lisa


-- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Clark" <joeclark@joeclark.org>
To: "WAI-GL" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 10:13 AM
Subject: title inclusion


> Here is a recurring bugbear I mentioned the other day.
>
> When it comes to providing alternate text for images, current WCAG
> only ever bothers to talk about alt (universally supported, but short
> and limited) and longdesc (almost completely unsupported, and way too
> big most of the time). Meanwhile, the tremendously useful title
> attribute, supported by virtually everything save for Netscape 4 and
> OutSpoken for Macintosh, is ignored completely.
>
> title sits halfway between alt and longdesc. You can load it up with
> several sentences of text and it will still display even in monopoly
> browsers like Windows IE. Very often, four or five words in an alt
> and a couple of sentences in a title fully and completely sum up an
> image.
>
> As one of the "common attributes," title is looked down upon as Not
> Really Being Our Kind of Thing Here. Since you can slap a title on
> essentially everything, it is seen as not access-specific enough. But
> it's perfectly useful for accessibility. In fact, it is already used
> for accessibility. I know lots of page authors who never write a
> hyperlink or include an image without a title on each. And if the big
> screen readers cannot gain access to title text, they need to be
> upgraded; it's basic HTML.
>
> So what I am suggesting is that title be explicitly included in WCAG
> 2.0 as a form of text equivalent for a wide range of objects,
> including images and multimedia. I assume this would not be a
> difficult thing to include and would not require huge rewrites.
> --
>    Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org | <http://joeclark.org/access/>
>    Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques ||
>        "I can't pretend to understand the mind of Joe Clark"
>        -- Larry Goldberg
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2001 13:51:10 UTC