RE: Tool Tip behavior

Bruce wrote:
>I am glad to hear you say that IE is following our (?) recommended
>behavior of using TITLE over ALT.  This IS how it works for me with
>IE 4.5 and a Mac.

PJ: where does W3C / WAI recommend TITLE over ALT for tool tips? I searched
WCAG, ATAG, UAAG, and their respective Techniques and only found a mention
in the HTML 4.01 spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#idx-title-1
and the HTML 4 Accessibility Note.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/HTML4-access
"The new "title" attribute gives a short description of an image, etc.
Graphical browsers frequently pop-up this information when a user pauses
over an element with the mouse (tool-tips), but it is equally useful to
non-visual browsers"

PJ: neither reference recommends a preference order of TITLE over ALT. The
UA guideline 2 Ensure that users have access to all content, but not the
order.  Perhaps this should be made explicit in the UA guidelines? It may
make sense in a visual browser that the title= be render as a tool tip
since the user may have access to the visual image.  But I would recommend
a screen reader and text browser to render the alt=text first by default
and provide access to the title= some other way. After all, in HTML title=
attribute is not a WCAG P1 except for FRAME [WCAG 12.1], is a P2 for
navigation [WCAG 13.1],  and a P3 for ABBR [WCAG 4.2].

Bruce continued:
> ...
>I am NOT getting this behavior out of IE 5 under Windows 95.  I am ONLY
>getting ALT as the tool tip. ...
>The page I am testing ... http://www.dors.state.md.us/

Gregory wrote:
><a href="http://www.mdtap.org/"
>         title="Maryland Technology Assistance Project"><img
>         src="images/tap-logo.gif"
>         alt="Jump to MD TAP."
>         border="0" width="88" height="31"></a>
>
>JFW 3.5 (in conjunction with MSIE 5.01) reads the TITLE defined for
>the buttons, and not the ALT text, so that when i tab-to the tap-logo
>button, i hear: ...

thatch wrote:
>For the record, HPR speaks and tooltips in Netscape 4.5 and IE 5 [on
>Windows] all use the alt-text, not title ...

PJ:
It is also important to note that the visual image only has the text "MD
TAP" on it, so I was confused with the alt="Jump to MD TAP".  I would have
put the "jump to" in the title= if anywhere.  The user agent tells me it is
a link, not the author.  I instruct others to only include in the
alt="text" the text from the image and occasionally the word "logo".  This
example is visually an image link of a red logo with the text MD TAP on it.
I would recommend alt="MD TAP logo".

Why does JFW 3.5 render the title="Maryland Technology Assistance Project"
instead of the alt="text"?  Is this a user JFW setting, a feature of DOM or
MSAA, or what?


Regards,
Phill Jenkins

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2000 18:49:34 UTC