- From: fstorr <fffrancis@fstorr.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 20:43:41 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi all My company is using the services of an external usability company and are making a recommendation to use small inline icons within <a> tags when linking to Office/PDF documents. They are also recommending that all such links open in a new window. For example, if a link went to a Word document, the content in-between the start and end <a> tags would consist of a description of the link followed by a small Word icon at the end of the text. This, to me, seems inherently inaccessible as the icon cannot scale with the user's font preference - they'll be left with very large text and a tiny icon. Visually it will also make the text harder to read with tiny icons appearing everywhere. Their argument is that the icon would contain alt text to make it accessible, but that's fine for blind users but not for those who aren't but just need some very large content. I'm also not happy with their "all such content should open in a new window" as their link recommendations make no reference of informing the user that that's about to happen. All in all it seems a bit flakey and yet I feel that my colleagues are going to take their side (as this company are the 'experts'). Can someone/people either allay my fears or point me in the direction of some good, concrete research that will help me reject their proposals. Kind regards F Storr
Received on Wednesday, 20 July 2005 19:43:53 UTC