Leaving aside arguments about whether or not tag clouds are the new
mullets (http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405d.shtml), I've been
pondering how to make one that is accessible, given the questionable
accessibility of most of the ones out there.
Tag clouds suffer from a number of problems, the biggest one being that
they rely on style to provide meaning - shade (or colour) and
font-size are used to provide information about frequency and freshness.
This is obviously *bad* as it does not account for non-CSS user
agents.
There are problems even for users of CSS supporting user agents - whilst
it is easy to infer some meaning from the size of text (ie: bigger =
more frequent), it is not easy in this case to infer meaning from a
change in colour (which equals more fresh: red or blue?)
Wah wah wah. Check out this (very) basic demo (content borrowed from
http://www.connotea.org/): http://www.dotcode.com/accessible_tag_cloud.html
Presenting it in a table is as far as I'm aware the only accessible way
to do it, as using the title attribute or enclosing the information in
the link text itself (then hiding it using CSS) both have serious drawbacks.
Which means there are (surprisingly) problems for IE.
Thoughts? Mild agreement? Sly refutations?
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