suggestion for style documentation

[jadelennox]

I'm curious as to whether or not I am the only person who ends up having accessibility issues when people modify their styles to change the text of basic features. Specifically:

1. It's bad enough when the text goes back and forth between two different standards (e.g. "user info" versus "profile").
2. It's worse when the text is something the style designer came up with to be original but which still carries clear meaning (e.g. "about me").
3. It's extremely difficult when the text is all flavor and doesn't convey much meaning (e.g. "happy tracks in the sand").

Am I the only person for whom this is an accessibility issue? If this is a general issue and not just me, perhaps we could write some documentation and propose it to the style team as guidelines for what kind of textual changes are worth avoiding if you really care about accessibility in your style. Since end-users can change those texts, not just style designers, we could come up with something brief and nonintimidating for the customization pages.

(By the way, I know I was working on a couple of open accessibility tickets, and I vanished for several months due to personal issues. I'm back as of this week, and have started looking at those tickets again. Sorry for the vanishing.)

Comments

[amadi]

Isn't this the sort of issue where style=mine comes into play? I'm not sure how you can non-intimidatingly suggest to people that they shouldn't customize their own space because someone might have difficulty understanding their personalization choices.

I think this is also where titles on the standard links needs to be brought into play. Every system generated link, everywhere, needs to use the title attribute.

[jadelennox]

huh -- I forgot that style = mine also overrode the customized text, but you are right, it totally does. I'll have to configure to view everything in my own style. Thanks.

Title is an iffy one, actually. There has just been a whole long discussion of it on the webaim list, about how it is a lot less of a panacea than people think it is. For example, in most browsers, sighted keyboard-only users have no access to the title attribute whatsoever.

[amadi]

Title is, however, a part of the standard and an easy one to be brought into play for the standard links. It's an adjutant to properly formed and written links, not the cure for bad links, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used. And the number of people who can benefit from a title far eclipses the number who cannot.

[jadelennox]

Title is a perfectly acceptable thing to add but it really isn't about disability accessibility. The WebAIM community has extensive discussion on this issue here (although that thread gets a little bit bogged down in arguments about opening in new windows). The short summation of the issue in most user agents, title is only accessible via mouseover tooltip: screenreaders only read title by default configuration in a very small number of cases, and keyboard-only users have no access to the attribute. Moreover, in most cases (all over dreamwidth, for example), people use "title" as a repeat of "alt". The only benefit this adds in user agents is to people who are doing mouseovers and want the tooltip; screenreaders will already be reading the identical alt text.

Jared Smith has a fabulous summary of when title should be used and for what purposes. A brief excerpt:

Title is great for conveying additional *advisory* information that
might be helpful to sighted users who do not use a keyboard or for the
few screen reader users that might hear it. It's great for providing
additional cues, instructions, or details that are useful, but not
vital.

...

My general recommendations:
- Use title if you want to when advisory information might be useful.
- Make sure the title text is brief and not the same as the visible
text or alt text.
- Recognize that many (most?) users will never know the title text is there.
- Do not use it for vital accessibility information, except on frames
and perhaps form elements that do not have labels

[amadi]

I think one phrase there jumps out as problematic and a hinge of the entire hypothesis. "Recognize that many (most?) users will never know the title text is there." That strikes me as false on its face.

[jadelennox]

His point is that title text is pretty much only available to most people as a mouseover tool tip -- not something most people see unless they are actually selecting the link. If I read between the lines of what he is saying, it seems to me as hypothesizing that most very rare exceptions, people don't tend to mouse over links they aren't expecting to click on in the hopes of seeing more information. At least, that would be my hypothesis.

While I can't assert the truth of that one way or the other, the fact remains that the title attribute is not an accessibility tool, except in those very rare cases (forms and frames). Physically disabled users who are using adaptive technology are less likely than able-bodied users to gain benefits from the title attribute, not more likely.

I suppose there might be benefits to cognitively disabled users from the extra information in the mouseover tool tip, although I've never seen that asserted anywhere. But if it were true, it would require training for those of us who write the pages and how to write good title text to accommodate those accessibility needs, since simply mirroring the alt text (which is what we currently do all over the site) is not going to add much functionality.

[aveleh]

If your browser supports displaying title attributes, you normally have to navigate to that particular item in order to see it. For links, you also generally have to perform a different and slower action - such as hovering instead of clicking. So, I agree with jadelennox that it's likely that many users don't know that title attributes exist or how to access them.

I also know that for me, on my browsers that I use, they're not a reasonable substitute for finding an item in the first place. I can skim a page of links a lot quicker than I can navigate to each link and read its title text. And on one of my browsers I can only even see that title attribute if it's on a link - I can't see title attributes on other items.

But as said earlier, this particular instance ends up being solved by style=mine (and related) options.