Re: appropriate hypertext

--On 7/19/00 6:01 PM +0100 Brian Kelly <lisbk@ukoln.ac.uk> wrote:

> I guess a disabled person with learning disabilities who uses a
> foot-pedal would prefer
> "Press foot pedal" rather than "Click here" or something device
> independent.  There's an opportunity for some personalisation here.

My problem with "click here" has nothing to do with the mouse-centric 
nature of the term click and everything to do with making the link able to 
stand on its own.

To use the site that started this conversation as an example: Upon seeing 
Mr Poehlman's posting on the IE/JAWS rendering of the site my first 
reaction was click for details on what? After looking at the site I see 
that it is a list of dates and the cities of the tour which form that list 
of links. Each link has the title "click for deatils," which in the 
rendering appears to obscure the text of the link. What was a servicable 
set of links is now almost useless for this particular user agent 
combination. Is this perhaps a case of the AT being too helpful? What kind 
of advice can we give developer who we tell to always have a title for a 
link, even when they have produced a link that stands by itself?

I think that things (which the site has done) such as making the headlines 
of the stories links instead of making the user who is tabbing through the 
links guess which "full story" they are going to are helpful. Its this kind 
of change that we should look to promote instead of focusing on the 
semantics of mousing vs. keyboarding.

Mitake Holloman Burts
mitake@klas.com

Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2000 14:51:21 UTC