RE: Creative (?) solution for redundant links

Don't like it I'm affraid. From a visually impared point of view I would
simply think that the page creator had forgotten to alt tag the image. There
is no way for me to know that the two links are actually the same. I would
just see the cursor change to a hand indicating a link but no hover text
which I rely on when using images as links. 

Cheers
Ian



-----Original Message-----
From: David Poehlman [mailto:poehlman1@comcast.net]
Sent: 11 March 2002 16:53
To: Mike Scott; 'WAI (E-mail)'
Subject: Re: Creative (?) solution for redundant links


Jaws has a bug that forces the file name of the image to be rendered
even though it is alt="" but it is not rendered as a link therefore the
strategy might be effective.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Scott" <mscott2@msfw.com>
To: "'WAI (E-mail)'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 10:16 AM
Subject: 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





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Received on Monday, 11 March 2002 12:10:46 UTC