Accessibility feature in htmlArea RTE 0.7.2

Categories: Development Created by Sacha Vorbeck
The new version of the htmlArea RTE 0.7.2 brings along a new accessibility-related feature, that makes it easier to differentiate between internal, external, download and mail links and those links opening in the same browser-window, a new browser window or a pop-up window.
It is now possble to define
- a default title tag
- a default link-icon
- a default alt-text for the link-icon
for every type of link you can set in the RTE.

As the new link-icons are inserted directly into the HTML-code of your
website there is no need to insert them as a CSS-background image any
longer which is not correctly supported in all browsers and is
especially buggy when the link is stretched over a line-break.

An example:
<a class="external-window" href=

"test.tld" title="Opens external
link in new window"><img src="externalwindow.gif" alt="New window"
height="10" width="14">Cool site</a>

Here is an example that sets a default icon and alt-text for external
links, it has to be copied to the pageTSConfig field of your root page:

## Default anchor classes configuration
RTE.classesAnchor {
elink {
class = elink
type = url
image = fileadmin/elinkicon.gif
altText =
titleText = Opens external link to
}
}

## Define which anchor classes configuration will be used be default for
## the different link-types in the link-wizard window
RTE.default {
proc {
classesAnchor = elink
classesAnchor.default {
page =
url = elink
file =
mail =
}
contentCSS = fileadmin/css/rte.css
}
}

Add this to your rte.css:

a.elink
{
color: #777;
font-style: italic;
}

With the default title text you can motivate your editors to add a
useful description e. g. if they add a link to a complex balance sheet PDF.