More Accessible Popup Windows (If Coerced)
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
There’s something extremely annoying about pop-up windows and yet clients often seem to demand them as though they were the answer to that internal fear users will follow a link and never return. My advice from the beginning is if you have such a link remove it immediately - problem solved. There’s a lot to be said for never linking to sites far more interesting than your own.
In real life this fear just isn’t founded and the last thing you should be doing is trying to hold your users captive. If they want to leave then let them, for Christ’s Sake! It’s repeat visitors and conversions that make a successful site not keeping your window open in some sub-level dungeon on the task bar. You’ve probably figured already that pop-ups confront users with a back button that isn’t going to work. And sometimes the window is chromeless. It’s obtrusive, offends a large number of your users, and will confuse the hell out of sighted users let alone someone using assistive technology. And they should never EVER occur without a warning! OK the rant is over for now so we’ll carry on (we understand that pop-up windows are bad for usability and shitty and considered industry worst practice). About the only thing you should be popping up in a new window is a PDF (Portable Document Format) file in its native application.
