RE: Issue #832 Clear link text, etc. (action item)

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Jim Thatcher
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 1:27 pm
To: 'Ineke van der Maat'; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: Issue #832 Clear link text, etc. (action item)



Ineke van der Maat: <quote>
When a screenreader can spring von link to link and in every link is
written "read more", so what do you understand/remember after hearing
this 4 times? </quote>

Jim:

I'm sure James understands that problem. But when information is in the
title attribute screen readers can announce it - though not necessarily
by default. (JAWS options are: link text, title text, or longest text).

The "click hear" metaphor for this problem is not a good one because the
"click here" sentence can be easily rephrased to yield link text that is
adequate. Much more frequent and daunting is the situation where
numerous distinct textual items have links associated with them and
these would be like James' example "Read more." 

A few years back, when we first launched the IBM accessibility
guidelines
(http://ibm.com/able/guidelines.html) each guideline had some text (the
checkpoint text) and then three links, "rationale", "techniques" and
"testing". There are many examples like that. Situations like that are
common where and full text links are not reasonable. As I understand the
current proposal, it would allow such links (assuming a title gave more
detail) at level 1, but not level 3. That seems OK to me.

John:
I agree with James Craig's proposal re: Level 1 and Level 3.

Jim Thatcher's explanation is correct (so is the one Gregg posted a few
minutes ago, of course).

JohnJim
Accessibility, What Not to do: http://jimthatcher.com/whatnot.htm.
Web Accessibility Tutorial: http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm.

Received on Friday, 2 July 2004 14:43:34 UTC