Avoiding redundant title attributes

The title attribute is one of the overlooked attributes in the HTML collection. It's most often used to mark up abbreviations with their expanded forms. Sometimes it's used to rout around Internet Explorer's tooltip behaviour of image alt attributes.

The attribute itself is meant to supply optional supplementary information. The most beneficial example is in conjunction with the abbr element, providing the knowing user with an expansion of an abbreviation. A second practical example is using it with forms to provide additional relevant information. (We also looked at using titles with form fields.)

But there are many examples of a title attribute being used to provide the same information that's already available and accessible. The most common example is links, especially in navigation you see the following piece of markup:

<a href="/sitemap/" title="Visit our sitemap">Sitemap</a>

Here the title attribute is just a plain duplication of the link text. Sure, it may have two extra words of Visit our which don't appear elsewhere, but this explains what a link does, and is just as redundant and irrelevant to site visitors. Most of them would need to have understood what a hypertext link is and what it does before even arriving at your site. Its just not necessary.

The extra text is a variant of the click here problem, it explains about how to activate a text link rather than succinctly describing the destination.

Some users have their screenreaders configured to read out both the link text and the title attribute. In this case, the above link would read out "Sitemap visit our sitemap", and either prefix that with the word "Link", or switch to a different voice to indicate the presence of a link. The duplication slows down the reading of the page, and is an unnecessary hiccup.

There is very little benefit to the title attribute in this code example. It is better, accessibility wise, to just drop the title attribute altogether in this instance.

Creating barriers for screen magnifiers

Screen magnifiers have the tendancy to make all title attributes appear when they have a titled element within the view of the magnifier. Any title, be it on a div, or a header, or a paragraph or a link, will appear in a tooltip like fashion. A significant use of titles may distract a screen magnifier user, even prevent them from seeing a particular piece of content because it has been obstructed by a tooltip.

There's just no positive accessibility benefit to using a title attribute to duplicate existing content. The title attribute. when it offers no extra value, hinders more than it helps.

April 14th, 2008 / 2 Comments / Tags: accessibility, screenreaders, screen magnifiers, title, links, redundant, understanding, configuration, duplicate / Trackback

Using titles on form fields

Form elements provide a decent range of accessibility options: label elements match up label text with their corresponding field elements, fieldsets group together similar input elements and the legend provides a succinct title for these groupings of fields. With those elements alone, forms are fairly simple to mark up in an accessible manner.

The difficulty comes when you need to add some supplementary information to an input field, or you need to provide a text equivalent to a non-text way of labelling a form field. Sometimes having one label per form field is a little messy, and can create accessibility problems when a visual requirement needs to be met.

The title attribute is mostly overlooked and underused. It is little known, but screenreaders read out the title attribute on form fields when in forms mode, even if titles are not read out by default. It's an exception to the general configuration.

Multiple choice questions

Many surveys offer a list of multiple choice questions where the possible answers are the same for each question. This type of form is normally marked up in a tabular-looking fashion, where the question is a row header, and the possible answers are labeled by a column header.

Marking this up as a table may be the correct semantic way, but the implicit association is not available to a screenreader in forms mode. The only elements that are available in forms mode are form elements (and their attributes). Thus, a form with a tabular structure needs additional markup to make it accessible to screenreader users.

Multiple labels, one per form field

One downside of labels is that one label can only be associated with one input field, so it proves a challenge to markup such a form without resorting to duplicate labels which then need to be hidden from view (and creating a unique id to map each label to its corresponding input field).

Implying column and row headings

Hiding most of the form labels brings another problem to the fore. When column and row headers are used visually to label a field it is visually fairly obvious that a relationship applies horizontally or vertically. There's a visual cue going on, and sighted people grok this cue almost immediately.

Unfortunately, this cue fails when the entire table cannot be seen in one go. People using screen magnifiers, or very large text sizes, only see a portion of this tabular form. They may not be able to make the visual connection because the column or row header may not be within the viewing region of the screen magnifier when the focus is on a particular form element. The further separated the form element is from its column and row headers, the more difficult it is for the screen magnifier user to figure out what information is being requested by the current form field. Scanning to find the column and row headers for a form field is prone to error, and makes the form more difficult to fill out.

Title attribute as a text equivalent

The overlooked title attribute provides a neat solution to this problem. Screenreaders will read out the title attribute on form elements in forms mode. Every form field with a title has a label that can explicitly identify a particular form field.

Screen magnifiers have the feature of displaying the title attribute when an element receives focus, so when a form field has focus, the title is presented as a tooltip adjacent to the form element. This alleviates the problem of the screen magnifier user scrolling around to determine the purpose of a form field.

Supplementary form field information

Another use of a form field title attribute is to provide supplementary information to a particular field. This can be, for example, a more descriptive variant of an existing label, a reminder that a field is mandatory, an example of a valid input (like the format of a date), or brief help text.

This supplementary information appears as a tooltip when that input field receives focus. This tooltip can be progressively enhanced, or stylistically improved, using JavaScript. The Content Management System Plone makes excellent use of the title attribute and JavaScript to present a visual cue for each for field on a form. This makes a form a little more usable, with very little cost, and that content is available to screenreader users too.

More accessible and usable forms

The title attribute offers an extra avenue for associating text to a form field. It should not be used as the first means of associating a label text with a corresponding form field. In situations where supplementary information is useful, the title attribute is helpful. In some situations where using labels results in masses of duplicated and redundant text that need to be hidden offscreen, it makes sense to use a title attribute instead. As with all accessibility problems, use the solution that best serves the needs of your visitors.

March 25th, 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: accessibility, screenreaders, screen magnifiers, forms, labels, visual cues, tooltips, usability, title, progressive enhancement, input, form fields / Trackback

Avoid skipping header levels

There have been various discussions in web development circles about whether we can skip heading levels for various reasons, including structural consistency.

Repurposing headers

One of the benefits of a proper and consistent heading structure in an HTML page is that they can be repurposed to improve access to the content. For example, the heading structure could be extracted into a Table of Contents or an outline, providing in-page navigation or overview.

Screenreader users have header navigation, which allows them to go through the document on a header by header basis. It's not perfect, but its very useful to find a piece of information quickly. The screenreader exposes a means of navigation to next or previous headers of a particular level, so a visitor can, for example, jump to the next second-level heading. So far there's no indication of what header levels are available unless the user enquires.

Barriers in skipping headers

This means that if heading levels are skipped they may not be found by a screen reader user. For example, if a screenreader user is navigating down the second level headings (h2), and finds one that comes close to what he's looking for, he may elect to navigate through the third level headings(h3). If this level is skipped in the header structure, the user will be informed that there are no third level headings. Without third level headings, the expectation is that there will be no fourth, fifth or sixth level headings there either. So those headings will typically not be found by a screenreader user.

Skipping a header level makes navigating by headers less usable for screenreader users.

March 10th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: screenreaders, accessibility, headers, skip, structure, semantics, navigation, outline, repurpose / Trackback

Signpost forms with headers

The typical websites of today commonly have small forms in various locations on the page. These forms could be logins, subscribing to mailing lists, site search, blog comment form; they are ubiquitous because they tend to cover important use cases on a site.

It makes sense to inform screenreader users of these forms - particularly login and search, because they form an important part of getting things done on the site, or navigating to a personalised part of the site.

For that reason, preface all of these forms with a header. This allows screenreader users to use headers as a way of navigating all the elements in the page. Make the header text descriptive, for example "Login to your account", or "Search this site". It would be better to integrate these headings as part of the design, but they can be hidden by positioning it off-left if needed.

It's more natural for this heading is placed before the start of the form, outside the opening form tag. That way a screenreader user can find the relevant header in heading navigation mode, and when they switch back to the normal page navigation mode the first thing immediately after the header is the form.

Ensure that the heading level makes sense in the document structure, and don't skip a heading level. Use an h2 header for forms that appear before the h1 header; there ideally should be only one h1 header per page.

March 10th, 2008 / 3 Comments / Tags: screenreaders, accessibility, forms, headers, signpost, navigation / Trackback

Deciding when display: none is appropriate

It's common knowledge that screenreaders won't read out content styled with display: none, but that doesn't mean content should not be styled this way. There are times when it is appropriate to style content this way, but we need to be careful.

Progressive enhancement with display: none

Core content should never be styled with display: none when JavaScript is not available. When JavaScript is enabled, it can hide content using display: none as long as there is an accessible means of reaching that content.

There are advantages to using display: none. We can make a page cleaner and easier to understand for screenreader users by hiding chunks of content that are not absolutely essential to be always available. And by having an accessible means of displaying that content, the screenreader user can chose to make that content available and read.

Drop-down navigation

A typical scenario of when display: none is appropriate is sub navigation in a drop-down menu. A screenreader user can then quickly skip through the top-level navigation items, or he can activate one of them, undoing the display: none on the sub navigation, and then navigate into that top-level's sub navigation.

The benefit for the screenreader user here is that they are not forced to wade through all the links of a navigation bar. They can deal with the navigation in discrete and easier to understand chunks of links. It makes a difference offering links in groups of seven, rather than expose the screenreader user to all 150 plus links in the navigation.

March 5th, 2008 / 5 Comments / Tags: screenreaders, accessibility, display, display: none, progressive enhancement, enhancement, javascript, dropdown, menu, dynamic, hide content / Trackback

Avoiding visibility hidden

Hiding content from view with visibility: hidden in many cases prevents the screenreader from reading the content, so content styled this way is inaccessible. This technique is not appropriate for hiding content on screen because no screenspace is saved by styling this way - the visitor is left looking at a blank region the size of the hidden content.

In a number of cases visibility: hidden is used in conjunction with positioning the content offscreen (position: absolute; left: -999em;). This is unnecessary since positioning content off the viewport is sufficient to hide the content, and the visibility: hidden makes the content unavailable to screen readers.

There's no reason to use visibility: hidden. Positioning the content offscreen is safer and has far less accessibility implications. If you fee that visibility: hidden is appropriate for your requirements, I strongly recommend revisiting the requirement and finding an altogether different solution.

March 5th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: visibility, hidden, screenreaders, accessibility, hide content, offscreen, viewport / Trackback

Providing link text

In websites offering news, it's common for there to be a story title and an image both linking to the actual story. The design requirement, or even a tracking requirement, may force there to be two separate links, one for the story title, and one for the story image.

Image links

A common mistake is to correctly determine that the text equivalent for the image is already present on the screen, in the form of the story title, and go from there to inserting a null alt attribute (alt="") for the image. When that image is the sole child of an anchor we are left with an anchor with no link text. And that's an accessibility barrier.

The screenreader fallback when there is no link text for an image link is to extract something from the image's src attribute - a URL - and this typically results in something unintelligble being read out by a screenreader.

What we need to do here instead is to populate the alt attribute with something that can be used as link text. In the case where the only appropriate (and succinct) text is the story title, it is fine to use that.

Redundant links

Its true that having two links with the same perceived link text linking to the same page is a redundancy, but this is much less of an evil than a text-less link. And much less of an accessibility barrier too.

March 4th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: accessibility, links, images, image links, null alt, alt, link text, redundant links, alt attribute, screenreaders, fallback, readable links / Trackback

Positioning content offscreen

In cases where we need to hide content from a visitor but still make it available to the screenreader, we position it offscreen.

The simplest way to do that with CSS is to use the following style:

.offscreen {
    position: absolute;
    left: -999em;
}

Avoid offscreen using top

A typical mistake is also to set the top property to a negative value in the same style rule. This just about works when the content originally appears at the very top of the page - like a set of skiplinks.

But, if the content you are hiding is originally below the fold on the screen, when a focusable element in the off-screen styled content receives focus, the page scrolls right to the top of the document trying to bring this content into view. This jump in content creates confusion for keyboard users, and screen magnifier users.

What is just as bad is when the user tabs again, the page again jumps, this time downward to the next focusable element.

When a container of content is positioned offscreen, the focusable elements within still remain in their original tab orders, so they will receive focus as if the content were still in its original place in the document flow.

Offscreen positioning using top interfers with the expectation that focusable content is in a top down order. Offscreen left doesn't suffer the same fate because the vertical positioning of the content hasn't changed, so no upwards scrolling is required.

Move focused offscreen content back onscreen

Note: When positioning content offscreen which contains focusable elements, you should also ensure that when those focusable elements receive focus that they are brought back into the current viewport. This is necessary so that keyboard users can see the content.

March 4th, 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: offscreen, position, absolute, top, left, accessibility, tips, CSS, focus, scroll, keyboard, screenreaders / Trackback