Understanding Accessibility
by Vivienne Trulock
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Guideline 10. Use interim solutions.
Checkpoint 10.1 - Until user agents allow users to turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user
Opening new windows can cause problems for assistive devices and novice users. The user should always be aware that a new window will open on a particular event.
How do I do it?
The attribute ‘target’ is generally used to open new windows. In a frameset the use of ‘target’ is permitted once the frame has been named. If you are not using frames but want to use target to open a new window, you MUST inform the user that this is happening as users can become disoriented if the 'back' button fails to work as expected.
You can put text explaining this directly on the page, or in the link tag's title attribute. In a frameset the use of ‘target’ is permitted once ‘_blank’ is not used
How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?
The page will be scanned in Dreamweaver for instances of the target attribute. Where the target attribute is found, and the page is not a frameset where the target has a name, and no text warning was given, the page will have failed the check. If any other pop up windows appear as a result of loading the page, the page will fail the check.
