RE: Tool Tip behavior

Phil,

I 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.

You asked:
> Where does W3C / WAI recommend TITLE over ALT for tool tips?

Well, I remember that being the consensus reached on the general IG list.
Perhaps my memory is faulty.  I could not find the old thread when I looked
for it.  I did not mean to imply that this piece of advice made its way into
any formal guidelines.

Should this distinction get kicked over to the GL list or is a general UA
issue that does not have much to do with accessibility?

-- Bruce


You continued with:
> 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"
>
> 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].
[snip]

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2000 09:20:13 UTC