> Matthew Pennell > 1) Many (most?) screenreaders do not read the title attribute by default. > 2) Many (most?) screenreaders are perfectly able to execute JavaScript, so > when the user clicks the link, what happens? It might announce that the > document structure has been updated (by the addition of the lightbox div > overlay), but that doesn't tell you where or what has happened. > 3) Screen magnifier users might not be able to see the changes to the screen > when they click the lightbox link. > 4) If the link's href points to the image, how does that help people with > scripting disabled? They just get the picture, with no caption.
Another one: 5) by default, lightbox scripts don't account for keyboard users very well; try tabbing to a lightbox image, activate it, then try to simply tab to the close button. in most situations, the caret/focus is still on the page: you've effectively tabbed to the next focusable element on the main page, but the lightbox is still there and blocking the view. yes, some lightboxes have added things like pressing X or ESC to close the lightbox, but that's not obvious to users. After a lot of soul-searching, I added a lightbox to our site, but made some modifications to its code and implementation. Still far from perfect, but I only use them for added interest, not really important content (though yes, we can argue that *any* content added is important, and should therefore be exposed completely to screen reader users): 1) the ALT reads "Photo: [title of image] (click to enlarge)" 2) yes, that's still a problem. I'm hoping that soon we'll be able to drop some ARIA stuff in there to alleviate the problem. 3) yes, also still problematic. 4) I've spent a bit of time working on this with additional scripting. Basically, the non-javascript link points to our photo gallery page. With javascript enabled, there's an additional script that modifies the href value of the lightbox links and adds a further GET parameter to the URL. the photo gallery page at the receiving end looks for this parameter, and if present simply pushes out the image on its own. Hope that makes sense...see it in action (with and without javascript) at http://www.salford.ac.uk/about/special/ for instance. I use slimbox with mootools, and my additional script that does this is pretty straightforward http://webhost.salford.ac.uk/common/slimbox_custom.js 5) i've modified the original slimbox to also close when a user tabs, to at least make it more friendly to sighted keyboard users. In short, there's still no perfect solution, but I had to make a pragmatic decision in this regard. I'm ready to be tarred and feathered now :) P ________________________________ 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] *******************************************************************
