Web Accessibility Gone Wild
August 30, 2008
Web Accessibility Gone Wild presents a wide variety of mistakes, misconceptions, over-indulgences, intricacies, and generally silly aspects of modern accessibility.
August 31st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Hi
You say about alt tags for decorative images that are not “hidden” by CSS - “and most often, this means alt=”" for these types of images”. In a perfect world I would agree, but unfortunately so many webdesigners forget to add alt tags to important images that when I come across alt=”" I am not sure if that is because the image is not important or the designer has forgotten. I would much rather hear “alt equals photo of my cat” than “alt equals blank”. At least I then know that I am not missing out.
Richard
September 1st, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Great article Jared. I wasn’t aware of the issue with “forms mode” and screen readers possibly not reading content.
On fixing screen reader deficiencies, you may be able to use aural style sheets such as the ’speak-punctuation’ element to help with some of these issues. See Web Axe podcast #58 for more on this.
Also, note that there is still some dispute over the longdesc attribute in HTML5.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Hi Jared, good article!
I have to repectfully disagree with parts of your guidance on the use of the title attribute. I think it is useful and appropriate to use the title attribute to label controls in situations where there is not a need for a text label, such as in controls contained within data tables. WAI-ARIA for example, makes use of the title attribute to provide the accessible name value to AT. It is a technique that we recommend for use in web applications especially.
September 4th, 2008 at 8:05 am
steve faulkner wrote:
I mostly agree. With form controls in a table, there is usually another way of discerning the functionality of the form items - the table headers. In this case, title really is providing additional/supplementary accessibility information. In other words, if you remove title, it’s still can be accessible (though not optimally so).
In cases where title is the only means of providing the accessibility, I believe this goes beyond the purpose of the title attribute as defined. I do admit, though, that this is a rather pedantic and strict application of HTML standards and isn’t so much an accessibility issue. If it works, use it - I just believe hidden labels work better than title in most cases.
September 10th, 2008 at 3:12 am
Hi Jared,
My only complaint is that #compliant is twice in the document. I was going to send an info to colleagues and pointing them directly to “Accessibility > Compliance” and it seems that the same name is used for “Noncompliant HTML != Inaccessible”.
I’m going to let them look through the article without giving them the anchor so as not to lose them (some use screen readers).
Feel free to delete my comment when it’s not appropriate anymore
And thanks anyway for the whole article, it’s very good and comprehensive.
September 10th, 2008 at 3:19 am
Hadn’t heard the word ‘agregious’ before…
September 10th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Stéphane, the anchor has been fixed. The link should be to #compliance.
Dave, the misspelling has been corrected.