Guideline 3.2.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 ("Make Web pages appear and operate in predictable ways") states:

On Input: Changing the setting of any user interface component does not automatically cause a change of context unless the user has been advised of the behavior before using the component.

That requires that whenever a link opens in a new window, there should be an advise. That can be in the title attribute of the link like so:

<a href="http://example.com" title="Whatever the user puts (opens in new window)</a>

It would be great if the module added such an advise when the option "Add JS to open external links in a new window" is active. It should not be added, though, whenever that option is inactive, since that would lead to a wrong advice.

Comments

yan’s picture

yan commented
Title: Accessability: Add advice to link title if link opens in new window » Accessibility: Add advice to link title if link opens in new window
Issue tags: +Accessibility
Everett Zufelt’s picture

Everett Zufelt commented

Although this would seem good in theory, in practice the title attribute of an anchor is not normally exposed to assistive technoogy when there is anchor text. That being said, mouse users who hover over the anchor will ge a popup.

Annotating the link text with either a icon with appropriate alt text, or invisible text using the D7 .element-invisible class would be preferrable to using title. The benefit of the icon would be that the afordance would be available to all users. That being said, I am not sure if there is standard iconography to convey the emantics of "Link opens in a new window".

yan’s picture

yan commented

Thanks for you answer, Everett. In any case, I think it is important not to forget that the advice only appears if the link actually opens in a new window. I.e., since we use javascript to open the link in a new window, I think the advice should be added through javascript, too. That way users that have javascript disabled won't see neither the advice nor the effect.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

I don't really see this as belonging to this module and not something I'll be spending time on. If someone wants to submit a patch to the 7.x-3.x version I'm open to suggestions.