Creative (?) solution for redundant links

We've talked a few times about the problems of the common "image
followed by text" link situation -- in particular, that we may want to
allow sighted users to click on either the image or text, but we'd
rather avoid making screen reader users hear the same link text repeated
twice (the image's alt text followed by the text link).

What if we did something like this (HTML code follows):

<img src="image.gif" alt="" onclick="document.location='newpage.html';">
<a href="newpage.html">Link Text</a>

(i.e., use a javascript "onclick" on the image to load the new page if
the image is clicked.)

The image alt wouldn't show up in a screen reader's links list, and with
alt = null, it wouldn't be read; at the same time, if a sighted user
(whose browser supported javascript) clicked on the image, it would act
as if it were a link. Without javascript, clicking the image would
simply do nothing, but the text link would still work.

Of course, this scenario would only apply if the image and the text link
were exactly redundant, and when the layout of the page was preventing
us from simply putting a single link element around both.

Thoughts???

Mike

Received on Monday, 11 March 2002 10:17:11 UTC