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

At 02:47 AM 2002-11-01, Jukka Korpela wrote:

>I don't think there's much about this issue in WAI recommendations, [snip] 
>What
>category would that be in WAI guidelines?

Please compare with

<quote
cite="http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10/guidelines.html#gl-orientation">

      10.2 Highlight selection, content focus, enabled elements, visited links.

</quote>

Al

-- all quote below

At 02:47 AM 2002-11-01, Jukka Korpela wrote:

>David Woolley wrote:
>
> > He's just told you that he thinks it is inaccessible to
> > people with poor, or no, control of their hands.
>
>Maybe, but I don't think that's the point. The webmaster reportedly said
>(when the terminology is corrected as you pointed out) that he is using the
>:hover pseudo-class in CSS to get the menus to change colors during
>selection process and that he the drawback is that the underscoring
>disappears on regular text until the mouse appears over it. The first part
>is fairly normal and actually corresponds to typical default behavior on
>most of the modern graphic browsers; CSS may be used to affect what the
>specific colors are, and this may have some impact on accessibility (if the
>colors are chosen poorly - black on darkish blue isn't a particular good
>scheme). The second part sounds very obscure. How would a CSS rule for
>a:hover affect _regular text_?
>
> > 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, - -.
>
>I agree with the principle that links should look links, whatever that means
>in each particular browser, but taken to the extreme this would imply that
>an author couldn't say much about any presentational issue, since _anything_
>might conflict with some user agents' defaults. You couldn't even suggest
>background and text color, since either of them might clash with some link
>color. So I guess the realistic approach is to say that if you do something
>with colors, you should use a color scheme which is not too far from the
>common defaults for link colors: blue for unvisited, purple for visited, red
>for active links.
>
>I don't think there's much about this issue in WAI recommendations, and I'm
>afraid it would be difficult to set up guidelines, partly due to the
>complexity of the matter, partly due to differing views. However I would say
>that some (possibly conditional) recommendation against the popular trend to
>set unvisited and visited links the same color should be given. What
>category would that be in WAI guidelines? Hard to tell. Maybe guideline 3 in
>the WCAG 2.0 draft ( http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ ), and maybe specifically
>Checkpoint 3.5 "Provide consistent and predictable responses to user
>actions" there; the draft mentions here as an "additional idea" that
>"conventions likely to be familiar to the user should be followed".
>
>But as regards to the site mentioned in the original question, I think the
>essential accessibility improvement would be to simplify the navigational
>menu. It's unnecessarily duplicated: it appears in one appearance at the
>start and in another appearance at the end of the page. This is confusing
>even visually, and in speech presentation, it's difficult to keep track of
>the situation: am I hearing _exactly_ the same links as at the beginning?
>Putting the links at the end only would remove any necessity of providing a
>"skip navigation" link. And using just one menu would surely give enough
>room to use normal text size (or even a little larger!) for the navigational
>links.
>
>--
>Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
>TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
>http://www.tieke.fi/
>Diffuse Business Guide to Web Accessibility and Design for All:
>http://www.diffuse.org/accessibility.html

Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 08:12:04 UTC