Re: Footnotes and Tooltips

Your client is quite right! Footnotes, and the method described in those
articles is a somewhat old-fashioned way of doing them now. It clumsy for
keyboard and blind users to use, and for the developer to program. and may
have the inherent problem of coping with cases where more than one
reverence on the page go to the same footnote, and how to return from that.
Accessibility consultants these days may likely recommend dispensing with
footnotes completely and using popup "Info" boxes to show the text instead.
I certainly do as people are well used to popups now. That way the user is
not taken off to another part of the page.

But as Caroline points out, it is important to get it right for keyboard
users and screen reader users, neither of whom want to see or hear the
footnote unless they have explicitly asked for it. So I don't like to use
the tooltip terminology. In other words, do it by marking the reference up
as a button that reveals the popup text if they press Enter or Spacebar,
and give the button an aria-haspopup attribute. And it must have a means to
close it. There are a number of accessibility considerations to consider as
for any popup box, but hopefully the developers will already have library
markup for this as most websites use popup dialogs and boxes in all kinds
of places.

Regards,
Guy Hickling
Freelance Accessibility Consultant