RE: Creative (?) solution for redundant links

Charles,

What if we used CSS cursor: pointer (or "hand" according to IE) to turn
the pointer into a "hand" when the mouse hovered over the image? 

Also, the text link would provide exactly the same functionality as the
image pseudo-link, so it's not practically necessary for the user to
find out that the image is a link if they don't automatically assume
that it is -- the hope would be to find a way to accommodate those
visual users who would instinctually assume that the image was also part
of the link...

(I'm just hoping to talk this all the way through -- I am definitely
still open to being convinced that it's a bad idea...) 

Thanks,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 11:10 AM
To: Mike Scott
Cc: 'WAI (E-mail)'
Subject: Re: Creative (?) solution for redundant links

Problem is that  users need a way of finding out what things can be
triggered by an onClick - this is a specific requirement of user agent
accessibility
guidelines:
http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10/guidelines.html#tech-nav-just-active
- so the solution doesn't really solve the problem, and instead leaves
the user, in a good implementation, in the situation of finding out
there is something that uses a non-standard link method that is not
written to be accessiblt and for which there is no helpful information
available.

cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Mike Scott wrote:

  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




-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61
409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4
92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,
France)

Received on Monday, 11 March 2002 12:39:48 UTC