Simon Willison’s Weblog

More tips from Mark

2nd July 2002

Time to catch up on Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility tips. Four have been added since I last checked, so I’ll go through them in turn.

Day 14: Adding titles to links

I was been hoping Mark would mention this, as it is something I have been trying to do while unsure if I was getting it right. Mark’s advice is simple—only use a title when the link text itself does not clearly explain where it will take you when read out of context.

Day 15: Defining keyboard shortcuts

Mark explain’s the relatively unknown accesskey attribute in HTML, and suggests a set of non-standard but commonly-used shortcuts. I will be adding this feature to my blog shortly.

Day 16: Not opening new windows

As a fanatical user of Mozilla’s tabbed browsing feature this is a personal peeve of mine—links that open in a new window start a whole new Mozilla window running (which incurs a performance overhead on my older PC). That said, Phil Ringnalda makes a valid case for using target="_blank" for links in popup windows as favoured by blogging comment systems, as links that open in the same window will result in a full web page loading in the small popup.

Day 17: Defining acronyms

This is the fun one—I’ve actually been working on something that relates to this for the past week or two and it’s almost ready to be released on to the world. More on this shortly...