May I just follow on to Patrick's astute advice. A very common misconception standards/accessibility designers/developers have is that the title attribute, regardless of the element it resides in, is turned on/activated by default in most assistive technology devices. It's not. From my experience with visually disabled users employing assistive technologies, they expect that content previous to the element, or more importantly, concisely defined in the text of the element, is what they need. IMHO, title attributes, for the most part are redundant, bloat markup, and are unheeded by those devices, and thus their users, that we strive to write for.
Kind regards, Frank M. Palinkas Microsoft M.V.P. - Windows Help W3C HTML Working Group (H.T.M.L.W.G.) - Invited Expert M.C.P., M.C.T., M.C.S.E., M.C.D.B.A., A+ Senior Technical Communicator Web Standards & Accessibility Designer -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Lauke Sent: Thursday, 29 November, 2007 18:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [WSG] Appropriate use of the ABBR tag and Roman Numerals > Matthew Pennell > It's not an abbreviated form of the full date by any stretch of the imagination. Tell that to the microformats crowd - they've practically stretched the idea of "abbreviation" to anything, just so they can fit their machine readable data into the page... > Why not just use a span (or whatever other tag is convenient): [...] > Functionally it's exactly the same as using ABBR. Except that screen readers won't expand spans or read out their title in any way. Though one could argue that screen readers should have their own heuristics to spot (the more unambiguous) roman numerals and read them out accordingly. I think maybe the more fundamental question for Tate: why are you using roman numerals if you know they're going to confuse people? Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Web Editor Enterprise & Development University of Salford Room 113, Faraday House Salford, Greater Manchester M5 4WT UK T +44 (0) 161 295 4779 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.salford.ac.uk A GREATER MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
