Gitter Channel Archive 12th of July 2017

[karlgroves] @chrisgeary92 @quidkid I would argue strongly that without actual research proving a “good” reason for target="_blank", there simply isn’t one.

My first job that had anything to do with accessibility was for a usability company. We did massive amounts of usability studies . Although my job at the time did not involve usability work, I often went into the lab’s observation room to watch and learn. I found it incredibly fascinating to watch certain patterns emerge.

One of the things that you could bet money on was that a vast majority of participants would get completely confused by links that opened new windows. Here is a case where we often hear from website owners that “OMG WE DON’T WANT USERS TO LOSE OUR SITE!!!11" and yet here’s what often happens:

The user clicks a link that opens a new window/ tab. In either case, the new page appears. The user either begins interacting with the new content or finds that what they’re looking for isn’t there. Either way, the user decides “OK I’m done with whatever that was, I want to go back”

The user clicks the back button to go back to where they came from. Ultimately, that Back button stops working because the history for that page/ tab only started when it was open.

Now here’s where things get ironic: If we’re lucky, they close the tab. But what they often did was close the entire window!!! So this practice of opening the new window/ tab actually does exactly what the site owner was trying to accomplish, because the whole friggin browser window is closed and they are very definitely no longer on the site.

The everyday user is just not as savvy as those of us in this Slack. Even in the case of modern browsers that open tabs by default people generally don’t get it. It was amazing.