Re: [w3c-wai-ig] :hover OK instead of blue underline (was: <no subject at all>)

> > >"Is this an accessibility thing? I'm using the hover tags from CSS to

Why is it that there are only two nouns in the web world: tag and HTML?
hover is a pseudo-class, used in a selector.  Your webmaster seems an
average, cookbook, web designer.

> > get the menus to change colors during selection process. The drawback is
> > that the underscoring disappears on regular text until the mouse appears
> > over it. Any suggestions?"

What mouse?  He's just told you that he thinks it is inaccessible to
people with poor, or no, control of their hands.  As it happens, Mozilla
treats focus by tabbing from the keyboard to be :hover as well, but there
is the potential for hunt the link here, and other browser may differ - older
ones will ignore the :hover, but might act on the other colour information.

My real concern would be people, particularly older people, but there
are a lot in younger ages as well, who have not been brought up on a
diet of Windows and GUI web browsers.  Whilst not knowing the many,
many, many conventions for hiding links on web pages, may lock them
out of nearly all commercial web sites, if you hope that your site will
bootstrap them into using the web, you need to be able to work within a
set of instructions, for using the browser and web, that fits into less
than half a page of handwriting.  Looking for blue underlined text
(given their instructor knows that their browser defaults that way)
doesn't use up that much space, but the only realistic alternative to
listing all the conventions for menu bars, etc., is to tell them to wave
the mouse around watching the status line - not I think something that
will encourage them to use the web, but something I've been forced to
do, on occasions, even though I have used the web for a long time.

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2002 16:56:47 UTC