Anchor Titles

I’m having a problem on a site I’m working on that the title-driven tool tip is not appearing in IE8.

The html and css isolated from the rest of the code work fine but in the site itself there is obviously a conflict or issue that is stopping the tooltip working. Firefox and IE7 do work by the way.

What I’d like to know is if the html is correct and there is a title=“link1”, will the title information trigger a screen reader or if the tool tip is not showing, would I be right in assuming that this will cause accessibility problems.

Many thanks in advance to anyone who has some insight.

Arthur, do you have Opera Installed? It has a voice function which can speak the contents of the page to you (in the same way that a screen reader would). :slight_smile:

Yes a proper screen reader is a great solution too, but running the built in function within Opera can give you a quick and simple idea of how it’ll be “read”.

There are some web accessibility sites or browser addons that do in sense show how a page would be tackled by some screen readers. http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs

Although there is a large difference between how a generic webmaster might “attempt” use one as to a person that actually required one to help them digest a web page.

Some people might just desire a page to be readout rather than need one to be read out. Obviously you could use a basic reader like: http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/

Finally managed to trace the IE8 problem down to some <strong> tags being generated by the CMS. Without them the tool tip works fine.

Appreciate you taking the time xhtmlcoder - useful stuff to know.

Would be useful if there was a site (maybe there is) where you could get a simulation of how a screen reader would experience your site - an audio version of browsershots sort of thing.

N0ob :x :lol:

Yeah it is 40 min per reboot. And your Windows has to have the Video codec thingie installed (which is found on the same page as the download for the thumb-demo).

What’s nice about NVDA is that you really can carry it around on a thumb drive and no installations necessary, which is Jawsome. I have trouble getting JAWS on some machines because my user account doesn’t have download privileges.

Ask and you shall recieve :wink:
http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/wa.php - Note: WA is NOT perfect. It was first developed by a grad student. When he moved on, it was passed to a staff member. She moved on to another place too, about 6 months ago. I don’t know who exactly runs it now.

As Alex said, if you have Opera, you can use the voice feature. If not, you can use FireVox for… Firefox. I know that dev too, I don’t know how much he works on it these days. You can also download NVDA.

To add on to this, no it isn’t just a one tiime 40 minute shot. It is per reboot :slight_smile:

I wrote this prior to reading Stomme’s reply fully.

Really appreciate all your responses - it’s not something I’ve spent much time on but will definitely plough through the posted links and try to get more clued up in this area.

It completely depends on the user’s settings. You can choose to allow titles to be read out, or alt text to be read out. You have no guarantee that titles will be read out.

In general you wouldn’t want to have titles on anchors unless the anchor text is really short and uninformative (which one should avoid when possible). You certainly wouldn’t want title text that repeats the anchor text, nor title text that states the obvious like “link1”. Annoying to everyone involved.

Want to know what a screen reader reads out? Test in one. JAWS for Windows has a free 40 minute demo you can download to a thumb drive (Freedom Scientific doesn’t want this to be used by developers but, oh well). There’s a similar one for Window-Eyes: these are the 2 largest (most popular) commercial readers for Windows. NVDA is an excellent free one but they seem to update it much better than the Big 2.

Orca is a screen reader that comes with Linux distributions running the Gnome desktop (so, not KDE). Unlike the three Windows readers mentioned above, Orca does not have a virtual buffer (a copy of the page the user then interacts with using special commands).

VoiceOver comes with all versions of OSX, including what’s on iWhatevers.

While stuff like FireVox are interesting, I’d rather test in a real reader, just as I’d rather test real browsers than browser simulators. But, you could get an idea what various readers do in various situations by checking some accessibility blogs regularly (this is easier on a developer than having a copy of every screen reader and learning how to use them all anyway).

http://www.accessibleculture.org/research/html5-aria/ (example page) has given me some excellent information

Marco’s blog in general is useful… I have many of his pages bookmarked. Example page:
http://www.marcozehe.de/articles/how-to-use-nvda-and-firefox-to-test-your-web-pages-for-accessibility/

WebAIM often expains how the Big 2 for Windows work with various code constructs: http://webaim.org/articles/

RNIB has some articles like this one: http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/wacblog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=be9c76d3-7ad0-4e03-a1a0-e6f6953b8178&ID=40
(yes finally they’ve brought that one back from the dead!)

http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/ has general accessibility stuff which ends up having a lot of screen reader stuff

Lots of older articles about older versions of readers at JuicyStudio.com though Gez seems to not update it very much any more.

So reading about screen readers and tests that others do is useful simply because it’s difficult to test them all, but I still recommend at least going through your pages with at least one popular reader. Then you can see what kinds of options the user have (mostly assume newbies will leave all reader and browser settings to default and may TAB through your pages, while experienced users will have things turned on and off and for example won’t need skip links and that sort of thing).

If the page passes: http://validator.w3.org/ then you know the syntax will be correct - although you cannot determine how good with regards to semantic code.

I assume you mean you are just using the (x)html title attribute rather than JavaScript. For example of title attribute: <abbr title=“World Wide Web”>WWW</abbr>

It depends upon the screen reader configurations but obviously the screen reader doesn’t need to see a ‘tooltip’ but will read the value of the title attribute itself as in the above case “World Wide Web”.