RE:: Thoughts about tooltips

Hi Jon,

your proposal

I suggest that the title content appear in the status bar when keyboard focus moves to an item with a "tooltip" title. Make the browser could have a default stylesheet options to identify items with tooltip with an icon beofre or after the link. 

is a interesting proposal (but what to do with veeery long tooltips, won't they be truncated?).

By the way, my first statement regarding tooltips was rubbishly wrong (thanks for pointing me to that, Steven). Actually, I meant something completely different. The statement should be changed to:

STATEMENT 1:  Title attribute should be designated to host tooltip strings as known from rich client applications. It should not be used for improved accessibility information in future AS LONG there are other methods (properties like describedBy, labelledBy etc.) available for that purpose.
STATEMENT 2: Reading of title (tooltip) attribute should happen on request, EITHER by a browser hotkey for popping up the tooltip window similar to mouse hoovering event and subsequent reading of tooltip content by screen reader OR/AND a configurable option of the screen reader to read alout the title attribute when focusing the respective element.

Stefan



Dr. Stefan Schnabel 
Accessibility Expert
SAP User Experience Accessibility

SAP AG 
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