libertus

Who’s This For?

Me, those involved in the conjuring discussion and both the common and lesser-spotted varieties of web standards geek.

Please feel free to skip over my notes to the content.

Is There Any Point Reading?

Not really, although you could have fun finding all the pop-up titles even if you’re unsure that the text makes sense. That said, if you use a Macintosh, an uncommon browser or depend on assistive technology, the success or failure of your search for the titles and any thoughts on their appearance to you would be most welcome, especially if any of my esoteric uses break or obstruct the natural page flow. I count 12 titled elements in this content. Can you read them all?

Did I Have A Point When Writing?

To deliver with humour something that also gives me a forum to explore a) approaches to dealing with weak and/or ambiguous standards, b) how an appreciation of the relationships between intention, interpretation and implementation of standards can be creatively exploited without undue risk of unintended or unanticipated failure and c) demonstrate and document all my previous and current uses of the title attribute in one place for easier testing with assistive technology.

What’s It All About Then?

This started out as a comment on a discussion about the HTML title attribute. I use them a lot, but today discovered I’ve been way out on a limb without realising. I’m down with the basic web principle of equal access for all. I don’t use assistive technologies, but I know people who do, so I depend mostly on my good judgement^* and sound understanding of software engineering^* to guide my page coding policy and practice. I want to be creative and experiment and play, but not at any risk to universal accessibility.

A Web Standards Abuser Comes Clean

Oh dear. I think some of the things I do with title attributes may be naughty. I didn’t know, I swear! They’re just so useful I cannot help myself!

All I wanted to find out was how to stop Firefox truncating the darned things, not that the solution might be to stop misusing them!

OK, here goes. Hi, my name is Libertus, and I misuse title attributes. I have been doing so, unchecked, for years ever since I discovered them.

My worst offence must be my occasional misuse of titles for parenthetical statements that the reader may view as they wish, somewhat like quick pop-up footnotes. I now know this may put readers using assistive technology at a slight disadvantage without good reason, so I’d appreciate any suggestions on a more universal replacement^* for my lovely asterisks that gives all readers the same choice.

My lesser misuses of titles are; a) wanting to put HTML tags in my titles, even though I know they don’t work, b) providing a brief definition for an uncommon word (e.g. floccinaucinihilipilification) for which I have provided a dictionary lookup link rather than a description of the link destination, c) provide my English translation for the occasional foreign language phrase I use (e.g. Sacre Bleu!).

I do follow the standards sometimes. I’m not all bad. I do not title all my links as a matter of course, preferring to title only if the link destination is not immediately obvious from the linked text, whether by deliberate obfuscation^* or, more commonly, when the linked text just plain reads better the way it is. I’m pretty sure that’s an intended and therefore acceptable use.

I also support title attributes for my outreach tags but they’re not a standard, more’s the pity, so there’s only me to bleat about violations.

But that’s enough about me! What about the rest of you? It’s not just my fault! I’m not the only title abuser, I know that now.

I was shocked when I realised how ignorant I was of the differing implementations of titles. They’re deceptively simple, clearly. I hadn’t even thought about it, which makes it likely few others have either.

As a page author, if I entitle an element, I want the reader to be aware of its presence so they can exercise a choice to read or not. I expect to assume greater responsibility for making the reader aware of titles if I use them in situations where they might not be expected or widely supported (anywhere except abbr and a elements). I’m sure careful use of CSS is all that would be necessary, for visual browsers at least, a selector like *[title] { text-decoration: underline; } being effective but rather blunt.

When assistive technologies get involved, I really have no clue about the guidelines, so I have to take a guess, and think how I would solve the problem.

For an audio interface, I’d prefer the synthesiser to discreetly clear its throat just prior to speaking the text of an entitled element. I assume that spoken interfaces also have some input flexibility as standard, such as control buttons or vocal commands, to replace the mouse. The cough indicates to the reader, with minimal disruption, that a title is present. The reader pressing the option or secondary control^* during utterance of the entitled text indicates that the title should be read next, prefixed with the word “titled”, followed by an end-of-sentence pause, then continuing with the following text. If reading the title causes the reader to lose place, the review button should repeat from at least the entitled element, including the cough, with a standard inter-word pause.

For braille interfaces, I’m at a loss. Something similarly discreet and functional as I have described for the spoken interface.

For print interfaces, titles should be ignored. If a title should be printed, CSS will serve, but it’s up to the page author. Perhaps they could be converted to footnotes.

For robotic interfaces, I’d prefer the title to be parsed and indexed along with the page for search purposes, and don’t care about other purposes. It’s there if you have a use for it.

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