Making Pop-up Windows Accessible

mirror of

Accessible scripting index | tom.me.uk home

Ah, popups. Good old window.open. When abused, the most annoying thing ever - don't you just love those onunload popups? But they can sometimes be quite handy, when used appropriately.

The Problem

There are a few common ways to open a new window, and all involve wrongly using the A Element. The A element creates a hypertext link, primarily used to navigate between pages (they can also be used to send e-mails with mailto, and a few other things). But often developers incorrectly use them just to trigger script events, either using...

<a href="javascript:void(open('mypage.html', 'windowName', '...'));">Link text</a>

...or...

<a href="#" onclick="window.open('mypage.html', 'windowName', '...');">Link text</a>