[Xerte-dev] Re: Tooltips / Alt text (title vs. alt attributes)

Fri Mar 20 11:51:38 GMT 2015

I'm not sure if Alistair's email will have reached the list as he's not subscribed to it so here's a copy of it, with my comments below...

>From what I can glean, Title isn't generally exposed to either keyboard only users or touch only users (eg on tablets). From an accessibility perspective Alt attributes are definitely the recommendation and Title should not be used as a replacement.

Whilst I agree that the hover functionality offers a different kind of benefit for a different kind of user (and arguably a bigger population) the two issues here are integrity of our accessibility credentials and the relative balance of benefits.

In terms of the former we should certainly use the Alt attribute rather than title.
In terms of the latter I'd argue that some people being wholly denied the essentials is a bigger issue than lots of people having a little luxury.

Does that help?

The wording in the editor is therefore best to be kept as plain English as possible. "Description" would work for me. Perhaps "Key points of image" would be useful because it implies that your description has a purpose that you need to communicate (eg a map of Nottingham might have many descriptions ranging from "Map of Nottingham" to "Map" but a Key points field might help people write things like "Map showing university in relation to railway station".

So, I think we do need to change title back to alt (with a different description in the editor). If we want to give the option of adding a tooltip too I think the best thing would be to have a separate field in the editor - perhaps an optional one. We could just use the same text for both attributes but this doesn't seem like it's best practice as there could be different use for them (alt as description and title as providing supplementary information?). It does mean a change to most models but not a complicated one. I'm happy to do the work for this if everyone agrees - although as Ron says, when people start adding with wysiwyg the option won't be there for a tooltip anyway so is it confusing things to add this option for images in some places but not others?

I'll make the changes back to alt but do you think it's worth adding an extra tooltip option?

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ron Mitchell
Sent: 20 March 2015 09:36
To: 'For Xerte technical developers'
Cc: 'Alistair McNaught'
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Tooltips / Alt text (title vs. alt attributes)

Tooltips can be very useful for ALL users by displaying additional context, explanation, instruction etc.
I would think having a single option for tooltips like we have now but perhaps in the code using whatever is entered as both a title and alt tag might be a useful compromise? Although I guess that means a change to all models? Also I'm not sure if that's accepted practice or not.

The other aspect of this is that I think once the new version is offcially released users are going to quickly switch to adding images via the wysiswg editor and for instance the plain text page rather than a graphics and sound page etc. I know the editor has an option for Alt text and it seems like that's used as Alt text and not title text as it doesn't show on hover.

Ron

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Tom Reijnders
Sent: 20 March 2015 08:56
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Tooltips / Alt text (title vs. alt attributes)

I did that, and indeed in response to issue #104.

Please Alistair, any comments on what Fay mentions? It does make sense to me. And I don't like tool tips anyway.

I must say, a lot of people were complaining that they didn't work. That's another reason I made the change.
Fay Cross schreef op 20-3-2015 om 9:51:
I've noticed that a change has been made to lots of page types so that alt attributes on images are now title attributes. This seems to be in response to a bug on GitHub (https://github.com/thexerteproject/xerteonlinetoolkits/issues/104) where tooltips were said to not work.

I'm not sure that changing all alt to title really solves the problem and really it's a wording problem on the editor rather than a problem to be fixed in the LOs. I thought that the main use of tooltip fields in the editor was to add a description of the image to screen readers. Previously these descriptions added as alt attributes did mean that a tooltip appeared when the image was hovered over but this no longer seems to happen in most browsers. Using the title attribute instead does force a tooltip to appear but I don't think it's ideal for screen readers (http://www.w3.org/TR/html/dom.html#the-title-attribute)

What does everyone think about this? Should the wording in the editor be changed from 'Tooltip' to 'Description' or 'Alt text' or do you think that it's more important for it to stay as tooltip and keep the hover functionality even if this might be more fiddly for users of screen readers?

Fay

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