RE: Thoughts about tooltips

parts of original mails copied below.

<stefan>
>FIRST STATEMENT: Originally title attribute is designed to host tooltip
>strings. 
>It should solely remain for this purpose and explecitely designated by
>W3C for this.
</stefan>

Yes, but the browser doesn't make these keyboard accessible and we need 
that support today. Also, people want to be able to create rich text 
tooltips. 

<stefan>
>SECOND STATEMENT: I don't want to have describedBy to be used for the
>tooltip BY ANY MEANS.
</stefan>(more details in original response)

Well, I don't feel that strongly but can understand Stefan's concerns.

<becky original post>
visual indicator that a tooltip is available
Tooltips could be given the ARIA role of alert  so a screen reader will 
speak the alert when it is made visible or Tooltip can be implemented
via 
the described by property on the trigger element. 
</becky>

<stefan>
NOOOOOOOOOOO, MUST BE SCREEN READER CONFIGURABLE IF TOOLTIP SPOPKEN ON
FOCUS OR NOT
</stefan>

I understand Stefan's concern that the browser and screen reader should 
make the title attribute accessible, but there is currently not a 
mechanism to do this. People want to create tooltips today that are 
keyboard accessible and may include rich/formatted text.  Given that, my 
question still remains? How should these tooltips be made accessible?

My current feel is to create some keyboard command like up ctrl-up arrow 
or shift-up arrow but I have to try and find some combination that has the 
least conflicts with assistive technology. This would be a "discoverable" 
tooltip - there may be no visual indicator that a tooI exists.  I don't 
want to make tooltips visible onfocus because I think that would be 
annoying to both keyboard and screen reader users.   I need to implement 
something for dojo tooltips and dojo tooltip-dialogs (these allow other 
focusable elements within them).  So feedback from more folks on the 
preferred mechanism to make tooltips accessible to keyboard and screen 
reader users would be appreciated.  See the thread for more details [1] 

thanks,
-becky

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Feb/0033.html








Becky Gibson
Web Accessibility Architect
                                                       
IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
5 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2007 21:34:16 UTC