Marking image-maps

Re: [The User Agent Accessibiity Guidelines group at W3C are presently
discussing
whether there needs to be a way of highlighting that a particular image is an
imagemap.]

I'm sure it helps if images that are hot are marked. I don't like having to
drive the mouse over sundry bits of graphical eye candy to see which ones
are links (eg by watching the status line). And I'm sure someone less
dexterous with a mouse finds it even more inconvenient. Touchscreens are
even less revealing as there is really no "mouse over event". A good image
map eg used as a menu, probably can convey its role and segmentation by
graphic design.

The marking as follows using the "title" parameter works well enough with
MSIE (haven't checked with other browsers) although the alt content only
shows if images are turned off or are missing. 

<map name="themap">
<area coords="0, 0,200, 50" href="goto1.htm" title="Open page 1"/>
<area coords="0,51,200,100" href="goto2.htm" title="Open page 2"/>
</map>
<img src="elr3_mo.gif" width="200" height="100" alt="The image"
usemap="#themap" title="Image map"/>


Best regards,
Rob Seiler
... Web: http://www.elr.com.au
... e-mail: seiler@elr.com.au

Received on Wednesday, 21 February 2001 11:05:47 UTC