[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: New properties for StatusNotifierItem: Accessible Label (1/3)]]

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Aaron J. Seigo wrote on 03/03/11 06:15:
>
> On Tuesday, March 1, 2011, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>...
>> But in general, while all interactive graphic-only
>> elements should have accessible labels, not all of them need tooltips.
> 
> example?

Icon-only labels at opposite ends of a slider: for example, muted at one
end and maximum-volume at the other, or low-zoom at one end and
high-zoom at the other. The icons should have accessible labels, but to
a sighted user they are obvious enough that tooltips would be silly. (If
they weren't obvious enough, the correct fix would be to make the labels
plain text, as slider labels often are, not to give them tooltips.)

>...
>> In a survey by Opera Software of 3,219,487 Web pages that used the
>> <img> element, 2,520,939 of them (78%) used alt=, while 367,132 (11%)
>> used title=.
>> <http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-images-elements-and-formats/#img>
>>
>> As far as I know, there are no public statistics on how often <img>
>> elements have distinct alt= and title= values. But we can conclude, at
>> least, that Web authors care enough about accessibility to provide
>> accessible equivalents most of the time.
> 
> after years of getting it pounded into their heads and with the added
> bonus that this text is often used for things like tooltips ... they
> still fail 11% of the time.
>...

That is because the <img> "API" was apparently designed without any
thought for accessibility.
<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element>

If the syntax had been <img src="...">alternate</img>, it would have
been much more obvious that an alternate was expected and what it was
for. Sure, some people would still have routinely written
<img src="..."></img>. But fewer people would have, because it would
have been more obvious that that was missing something than that
<img src="..."> is missing something.
<http://sweng.the-davies.net/Home/rustys-api-design-manifesto>

So I think it is important to bake accessible labels into the API in a
way that makes it obvious that they are needed, even for things that
shouldn't have tooltips.
<http://behindthecurtain.us/2010/06/12/my-first-week-with-the-iphone/>

- -- 
mpt
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