Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

One of Jakob Nielson’s “Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines” written back in 2003 was that a webpage should “never have a link that points to the current page”. Many users have a simple mental model of the web, and why shouldn’t they? When they click a hypertext link they expect to go somewhere else. When they don’t go anywhere at all, this simple expectation is boken and the user gets confused.
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Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner have written this excellent article Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users, a follow up to their previous article Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers.

Here they explain how Jaws 7.1 has improved in such a way that the “virtual buffer” can now be updated via a scripting method, which allows for Ajax interactivity to actually be of some use to a screen reader user.

An international site should ensure that all alt text is translated along with the rest of the content. After all, the end user may well be using a screen reader or other assistive technology to access the site, in a different language to the default. I wonder how many multi-lingual sites actually manage to maintain this good practice. I am also wondering how I can convince my clients to be that thorough with their translations.

Just checked the BBC News site and as I expected, they are meticulous in their management of translations. Every picture has language specific alt text. Of course much of this depends on the level of sophistication of the content management system and the controls in place to ensure such a high level of accessibility.

The first thing anyone learns about creating accessible web sites is to remember to add descriptive alternative text to all meaningful pictures and images so that those who cannot see them can still understand, depending on the authors interpretation of the imagery. What I have never quite understood is why in the ie browsers a tooltip popped up sharing this supposedly alternative text every time a user hovered over it. I thought this was one behaviour that would be left behind with the new improved ie7, but I was wrong. Personally I find this obtrusive, unsightly and unnecessary. Maybe some disagree with me and find it useful!

This has also lead to the complete misuse by many web designers of the alt text method, to describe destination links instead of the image itself. That is what the title tag has always been there for.