Re: Tool Tip behavior

Frabjious day, calhoot calhey!

Thanks Tom!

I think the phenomenon of authors removing (or not using) ALT because of MS
IE ToolTip pop-up behavior may be more widespread than we might care to
admit.  Here's the work around:

1)	Use good ALT text tag content (of course)!
2)	Specify TITLE="" -- this is important -- as part of the same (IMG)
element that contains the ALT text.

The result (with IE 5, I expect 4 also) is suppression of the tool-tip
pop-up.  Visual users get nothing (JavaScript swap-outs excepted) when they
pause their mouse pointer over a graphic.  ALT content IS still accessible
to screen reader and text browsers.

Check out http://www.dors.state.md.us/index2.html as an example (compare to
original home page at http://www.dors.state.md.us./index.html -- this demo
page will not live for long).

My problem from before is that I was trying:
<A HREF="foobar.html" TITLE=""><IMG SRC=foo.gif ALT="foobar"></A>
This works on IE 4.5 on a Mac, but not with Windows.  I should have tried:
<A HREF="foobar.html"><IMG SRC=foo.gif ALT="foobar" TITLE=""></A>

Now, this misuse of TITLE is probably an issue for some group to content
with, but at least we address a P1 WCAG checkpoint AND let authors get the
GUI behavior from IE that they want!

Sincerely,
Bruce Bailey
MSDE DORS @ MRC

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 17:41:48 UTC