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]

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.