Link (anchor) titles and accessibility

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I'd like to find out what the general consenus is for wording of anchor title attributes from an accessibility perspective.

I've read many sites that show how they would do things, but none seem to list good arguments for having the titles their way.

At present, on the site we're building, all links have attributes that begin with "This link takes you to", and then a description of the page. If the link points to an external site, the name of the site is appended.

For example:

- an internal link to the "About us" page would have link text saying "About us", and a title attribute of "This link takes you to the 'About us' page"

- an external link to the "National Weather Maps" page would have link text saying "National Weather Maps", and a title attribute of "This link takes you to the 'National Weather Maps' page of the Met Office website"

However, you can't please all of the people all of the time. It has been mooted that the title attributes should have only the simple text contained in the link ("About Us", "What we do", etc)... but this seems pretty pointless to me. After all - if the title attribute were only to repeat the link text, there'd be no point in having it.

As far as I am concerned, title attributes should be descriptive. They should give the user a description of what activating the link will do, or where it will take them. Notice I say "activating", because the user will not always be clicking (voice recognition, keyboard users, etc - which is why I have avoided using "Click this link to..." at the beginning of the title attribute).

But, some people might view the title attibutes I've proposed as being too long and unweidly.

I realise that for screen readers, having a whole navigation structure read out with long descriptions each beginning with "This link takes you to..." might be a bit of a pain, but AFAIK, readers like JAWS don't enable this option by default.

So - what do I do? Keep the long "This link takes you to..." structure? Have a pointless simple structure ("About us", etc), or is there a happy medium?

Thanks!
Dan

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

[/tt]

 

[BabyJeffy]

I doubt this is the place to discussing mediums (happy or otherwise) - but I reckon your initial suggest holds some serious weight. At least it certainly does for me.

The kind of people trying to promote the same text on the link as in the title are the same kind that promote empty alt attributes on image tags -- they pass validation and they take their site one step closer to A (or AA or AAA) but they miss the reasoning behind these attributes... they just include them to pass the test.

Ask the people who reckon you ought to use just the same text as the link... "what is the reason that title attributes are in place?". You can argue that since the text is the same as the link text... why even bother with the title attribute. If they come back with "so it passes validation" you can chuckle wryly (and think of me)... whilst suggesting that they have missed the whole point about validation and standards compliance.

Give them my phone number as an external consultant - I'll set them right

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page @ Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/blog/

[/tt]

What is Javascript? FAQ216-6094

 

[Foamcow]

I agree with Jeff.

The title attribute should tell you what the link will do.
Although I would make it as brief as possible.

Something like

Visit The National Weathermaps site

or

View weathermaps at the National weathermaps site

While writing this I even considered including the URL, which would be handy but I'm not sure how a screen reader would deal with it.

Visit The National Weathermaps site (

http://www.nationalweathermaps.com)

Again, it's about the intention of the attribute. You should use it in the correct spirit. Something that machine validation can't check for.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[glg1]

I also agree with Jeff, but I'd take it a bit further. Stating the obvious seems totally redundant. Rather - why should a visitor go to the link? -- and if possible make it somewhat specific.

For example:

Learn about tornadoes at the National Weathermaps Site

See the Rainfall levels at this site

or

Go here to see the rainfall totals(

http://www.nationalweathermaps.com)

The trick will be making it short, specific enough and help with furthering the understanding of the navigation.

my two cents,
George

 

[chrissie1]

I would go for

"Totally useless link, but click it anyway."

Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[ChrisHunt]

If that's all you're saying, I'd miss the titles out altogether. I don't think either "About Us" or "This link takes you to the 'About us' page" add any useful information to a link whose text is "About Us". Even something like "More about our company and the services we provide" doesn't really add anything that the user won't already infer from the link text. If the link text, and the context it appears in, doesn't fully identify where the link's going, you should change the text instead of reaching for the [tt]title[/tt].

In my view a whole load of tooltips appearing (and whatever the screenreader equivalent is) and stating the bleedin' obvious is less accessable rather than more. A page where you need the aforementioned tooltips to explain what's going on is even worse!

When I first started building sites, I had lots of stuff like this:

I buy all my dynamite from <a href="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.acme.com"[/URL] title="Visit their website">Acme</a>.

More recently I've stripped those kinds of titles out. Duh, it's a link, it's labelled "Acme", where else is it going to go? Maybe we needed that kind of prompting back in the 20th century, but I think people are more savvy now.

The only place I think link titles really are useful is where you have a series of items presented one page at a time - a list of events, a slideshow, a presentation. In such cases I'll have links on each page whose text is, say, "Next Event" and "Previous Event". The titles of these links are the names of the events in question. You can see this in action at

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

.

Just say No to pointless [tt]title[/tt] attributes!

Now empty [tt]alt[/tt] attributes, Jeff, are a different matter. In an ideal world where every content-important image was marked up with an [tt]alt[/tt] we wouldn't need a convention to identify the unimportant ones. As it is, we need a way to distinguish "You can safely ignore this image, it's just decorative" from "I can't be bothered to mark up my images properly". [tt]alt=""[/tt] is the way to make the former statement.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd