Re: What instead of click here?

I should have finished reading your message.  I understand and agree
with your points and even agree with them as I wrote my first thoughts.
My quibble though has always been the assumption that everyone has and
or can get the fancy tools.  Follow this link" was an example.  There
are other ways to accomplish the same thing and I don't mind if I go to
a page with jaws and hear "follow this link...link".
If someone has trouble with this extra bit of orientation, perhaps they
need to be educated in how to use their browser.  Try using ie 4.01 with
jaws 3.5 which is where a large persentage of jaws users are at and
likely to be at for quite some time and you will understand the
difficulties.  Also, consider that this is not all about oral rendering.
it also aids in cognition.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Ley" <jim@e-media.co.uk>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: What instead of click here?


David Poehlman:
>> [Ask Michel a question].   all as a link, it's clearer, it has
>> everything you need even if out of context of the page, and
>> doesn't include any device specific ideas.
>
> even better,
> "follow this link to ask Michelle a question." or some unambiguous
> alternative due to the fact that we need as much orientation as
> possible.

My UA does a perfectly good job of identifying a link, I don't see it as
being the job of the author to signify it's a link in text, the
structural A has already done that.

Consider again the list of links provided by a number of the above:
Follow this link to ask Michelle a question
Follow this link to ask Moomin a question
Follow this link to ask Snufkin a question.

It gets very laboured both visually and aurally, the "follow this link
to" provides no information, that's not implicit in the A tag (If you
really require that, it can be provided by your UA, it's not possible to
remove such text from my UA.)

Consider also a screen reader, such as Jaws would do with your
suggestion, My Jaws3.7 says
"Follow this link to ask Michelle a question. link", which seems to have
a high level of redundancy.  I've yet to see a UA which hides links from
users (it can be suggested by a page author, but all UA's can override
this.)

I can appreciate why you say that orientation is useful, but I think
it's
wrong to encourage usage which would be better served by trivial
education of the user, links are integral to the web, and I'm sure after
a few hours surfing the concept, and the implementations in the UA have
been learnt.

Jim.

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 09:27:23 UTC