‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.
A brief response to a 456 Berea Street post.
In a recent post, Roger Johansson highlights a useful piece of accessibility-related advice that’s often ignored. In summary, link title attributes should not just be a direct duplicate of the link’s textual content.
The prevalence of title-abuse seems to be an effect of over-eager developers thinking that a title attribute must be present, however useless it might be. The BBC accessibility guidelines also stress Roger’s point.
However, there are cases where title text is really quite useful, in addition to instances where link text is quite ‘obscure’. Navigation, which often consists of short, ‘snappy’ wording, is a prime candidate for enhancement-by-title. In addition, marketing terms occasionally dictate use of certain terms that might not be universally recognisable. They shouldn’t, of course, but it’s not always possible to resist them entirely.
I recently added title text to the ‘service links’ (RSS, twitter) at the top of each article page. The information provided isn’t essential, but it could certainly be useful, especially to those, for example, who are unfamiliar with what RSS actually is. Roger sums up this usage nicely:
Even in those cases, title text should be non-essential, since it will not be available to all users.
‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.
Sun 10 Apr 2011 18:35
Las Vegas Website Design said:
Wonderful ideas…thank you for sharing.