Saturday 7 August 2010

title attribute

I've been creating some onscreen tutorials (simple html pages with instructions) for Xerte. The idea is that the instructions are to one side of the screen and the software is running beside it so that you can just follow step by step instructions without having to look down at a piece of paper. I have found this method works well compared to paper-based tutorials.
To ensure that the tutorials are accessible, I have made sure to add tooltips to my images. Tooltips appear when you hover your mouse over images on a browser.
I have some simple graphics in my onscreen tutorials and I had added alt tags to the images. I tested these using Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explorer on Windows. For some reason the tooltips were not popping up in Firefox although they were working in IE. Also, I wanted tooltips to appear on certain links and they weren't working on IE.

I did a little bit of google searching and find the following:
  • For years, I've been calling them "alt tags" and really they should be called alt "attributes".
  • Firefox doesn't use alt attributes, it uses the title attribute and this works on both Firefox and IE
  • Title attribute works for hyperlinks as well.
Now I know to use the title attribute for all my images and a href tags as well!