Re: Tool Tip behavior

Well, sounds like Opera is the browser for you ;-)

Actually it provides a fair bit of configurability on tool-tips, although I
am not sure if it has options for images.

Charles McCN

On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Marjolein Katsma wrote:

  At 17:39 2000-03-08 -0500, Bruce Bailey wrote:
  >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).
  
  I'm using IE4.01/SP2 on WinNT4/SP4 and I can confirm that this method does indeed suppress the tooltips with this browser.
  When the page is viewed with images turned off, the image links are still usable (provided the browser is set up to use a large enough font).
  
  I also tested with Opera 3.60 and found that there is always a tooltip for the ALT text (I didn't check if there's a way to turn this off in the browser itself; I'm using practically default settings).
  
  So, as a method for the designer to conform to the client's wishes to suppress tooltips (without hindering navigability) it works - depending on which browser is used. As a web user, I'm not pleased - I actually prefer to see the (ALT or TITLE) tooltips and often hover the mouse over an image just to see if this provides some extra information.
  
  Cheers,
  
  Marjolein Katsma
  HomeSite Help - http://hshelp.com/
  Bookstore for Webmasters - http://hshelp.com/bookstore/bookstore.html
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 18:47:40 UTC