[thelist] Link and title accessibility

[Stuart Young]

On 27/02/06, Andreas Wahlin <andreaswahlin at bredband.net> wrote:
>
> If you have a link where the link-text is exactly the same as you
> imagine the title-text to be, you should omit the title attribut right?


Yes. The accessibility guideline says "Clearly identify the target of each
link." If the link text does that then a link title is not needed.

<abbr> tags should of course be used for things such as MIT, but if
> you have a link where the title attribute is identical to the abbr
> tags title-attribute, should you still use an abbr tag or is that to
> much?


I would keep the abbr title and ditch the link title. Although of course,
pedantically semantically MIT is not an abbr, its an acronym, which is used
exactly the same way as abbr.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_acronym.asp

Also, as a side note, titles such as
> title="Go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology homepage"
> must be quite unneccesary, as everyone knows that links go to homepages.
> title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
> Should suffice, right?


Yes, except that it is good to use "active" language on the web, because it
(sub-conciously?) encourages people to do something. Hence using language
such as
"View the 2nd quarter report in PDF format"
"Go to the results of the survey"
"Read the latest press release"
"Listen to Sue's audioblog"
etc etc

cheers

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