making onmouseover accessible

There was a thread back around the beginning of april about text menus that 
popped up when the mouse passed over them (the celebrated "mouseover" 
action), and how to make them accessible.  The discussion seemed to end at
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2000AprJun/0015.html 
without an answer.

There's a simple way to make a functional equivalent of mouseover on a 
object if there isn't something already defined for clicking on that 
object.  Just make that object a link so when you click on it it brings up 
a new page with content equivalent to what pops up with the mouseover.

What if the button already does something, say it's a link and the 
mouseover brings up summary info that helps you decide if you want to click 
that link?  In that case you could have an additional link you'd click to 
bring up the info.  Similar to a D link.  Perhaps an "M" link?   You could 
make the "M" links visible or not under control of a style sheet.  Also, 
the page brought up by the M link would have a link to what clicking on the 
original object would have produced.

Instead of an M link you could have a transparent image to which you could 
add appropriate alt text. Hmm... - except a transparent image wouldn't be 
suitable for sighted people with motor disabilities.

Of course, you also have to be sure the average user knows about this stuff.

There's also the long description but that may be used for other stuff and 
isn't yet implemented on all browsers.

Len
--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University 423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122

kasday@acm.org
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday

(215) 204-2247 (voice)  (800) 750-7428 (TTY)

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 17:10:37 UTC