RE: Accessibility impact of A with REL PREV / NEXT (in BODY) versus LINK with REL PREV / NEXT (in HEAD)

Thanks Christophe for this extra detail.

Alan Bristow
Elections Canada
alan.bristow@elections.ca


-----Original Message-----
From: Christophe Strobbe [mailto:strobbe@hdm-stuttgart.de] 
Sent: February-17-20 10:18 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Accessibility impact of A with REL PREV / NEXT (in BODY) versus LINK with REL PREV / NEXT (in HEAD)


I seem to have missed this discussion earlier ...

On 05/02/20 09:55, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> To my knowledge, no browser/UA/AT take advantage of the rel="..."
> attribute or expose it to the user in any meaningful way. So even
> technique H59 is rather dubious to me. There used to be browsers
> (probably old versions of Opera) and extensions (I have vague memories
> of something for Firefox) that surfaced rel="..." for a page, but this
> seems more like a historical quirk that never quite caught on.
I can't remember any browsers doing anything useful with rel attributes
on ordinary links (a elements in the body).
The link element in the head used to be supported by Netscape Navigator
(now long defunct) and is still supported in its successor SeaMonkey
(which even I no longer use).
I have created a few test pages and created screenshots showing how
SeaMonkey supports link@rel; see
http://cstrobbe.github.io/A11yWorks/wcagtests/html5/head-link-rel/link-rel-1.html


SeaMonkey can display a "Website Navigation Bar" is link elements with a
rel attribute (other than CSS links) are present in the head.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any method to access that navigation
bar using the keyboard.

And even SeaMonkey does nothing with rel attributes on ordinary links. I
am also not aware of an accessibility API feature that those rel values
might be mapped to. So at best you can use those rel attributes for CSS
styling and JavaScript.

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe

>
> In short, unless you somehow use the rel="..." attribute in some way
> yourself (e.g. if you have extra JS that somehow exposes relationship
> information like that to the user), I would not bother with those
> attributes at all.
>
> P
>
>
> On 31/01/2020 15:19, Bristow, Alan wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> If you have a minute to help me with this I would be grateful and smile.
>>
>> I am investigating the accessibility benefit, or lack thereof, of the
>> use of 'rel' 'next' and 'rel' 'prev' in <body>, with <a> tags, as
>> opposed to in <head> with <link> tags.
>>
>> E.g.:
>> ...
>> </head>
>> <body>
>> <a href=”dogs.html rel=”prev”>Dogs</a>
>> <a href=”cats.html rel=”next”>Cats</a>
>> </body>
>>
>> While H59 (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H59.html) demonstrates
>> the accessibility benefit from using <link> with 'rel' in the <head>,
>> I cannot seem to find any measure of the benefit of implementing
>> these 'rel' values in the <body> with <a>s.
>>
>> Does anyone know if it is generally accepted that as far as
>> accessibility goes there is a comparable benefit from these two
>> approaches, or no benefit with the BODY+A when compared to HEAD+LINK,
>> etc?
>>
>> Thanks, very much, for any comments.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Alan
>>
>> Alan Bristow
>> Elections Canada
>> alan.bristow@elections.ca
>>   [Logo du 100e anniversaire d'Élections Canada / Elections Canada's
>> 100th anniversary logo]  <https://www.elections.ca>
>>
>
>

-- 
Christophe Strobbe
Akademischer Mitarbeiter
Responsive Media Experience Research Group (REMEX)
Hochschule der Medien
Nobelstraße 10
70569 Stuttgart
Tel. +49 711 8923 2749

“I drink tea and I know things.” 
Falsely attributed to Christophe Lannister.

Received on Monday, 17 February 2020 15:26:37 UTC