Cartoon by Medi Belortaja
I’ve read numerous web accessibilty books and had the pleasure of hearing a screen reader in action and used properly.
In one night I became baffled about how the title attribute should be used in a url link. From my understanding and I could be wrong but the title attribute should be used to inform the user of what to expect on the forth coming page.
Now some screen readers don’t actually read out the titles so as recommended the link should be self explanatory as possible; none of that click here rubbish but more like Darren’s hair has reappeared!
Ok back to my question, Looking through an Accessibility portfolio and being rather nosey I checked out the source code, you can always find some coding nuggets there and noticed that the links featured the same title attribute as their destination page or the name of the link or none at all
Example:
<a href="travel.html" title="travel">travel</a>
or I would come across one with no title attribure:
<a href="travel.html">travel</a>
I would have done:
<a href="travel.html" title="Create your own perfect package">travel</a>
Now in my example I think I’ve informed the user the travel page if they where to click it, will allow you to create your own package holiday, select dates, destinations, hotels and transport and then book it. Now is that bad? I honestly thought that’s how links should be.
I can see in my example that for users of screen readers long titles can be rather too long and soon become annoying.
Can anyone point me in the right direction, share their thoughts and educate me?
Filed under: Web Accessibility
