Re: title inclusion

At 5:25 PM -0500 12/5/01, Joe Clark wrote:
>I cannot really figure out the HTML examples given. I think it has 
>something to do with
><a title="LINKTITLE"><img title="IMAGETITLE"></a>
>where the question becomes "Which title prevails? Inner or outer?" 
>Ideally, we should have access to both, but the inner one is clearly 
>the most specific and should prevail.

It's not necessarily true that the inner one is more specific.  The @title
on the <img> element _should_ be a @title that is based ONLY on the <img>
and NOT on the surrounding marking around it.  Thus, the <img>,
unless it's designed _only_ to be used as a link (by looking like a button
or saying 'click me!' or whatever), may be completely "unaware" that it
is the starting resource of a link.  However, the <a> element should
know this and should carry the specific @title about the link.

<a title="Follow this link to Kynn's page">
   <img src="http://kynn.com/graphics/k.black.gif"
        alt="K"
        title="Kynn's Glyph"
        longdesc="http://kynn.com/whatisthek.html" />
</a>

Note that this separation of link-specific @title on the <a> and
image-specific @tile on the <img> is also very useful and appropriate
when thinking about automated tools.  You may create the link first,
or create the image first, or move around the content inside, or
whatever.  By keeping the @titles attached to the right places, you
prevent confusion.

What should the screenreader read out?  That's a difficult one, isn't
it.  I'd say that the user should be given the option of what to have
read, be made aware that there's other things if they're not read,
and be able to manually trigger the full reading.

How you do that, I'm not sure -- I'm not a screenreader user nor a
screenreader engineer, so I'm not going to venture a guess as to the
mechanics of it.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2001 05:00:55 UTC