CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlhyperlinkaccessibilitymailto
qtgye
qtgye

Reputation: 3610

Accessibility of mailto links without email address

I have mailto links with which I allow users to manually put the recipient's address by leaving the mailto link empty, like so: 

<a href="mailto:?subject='Article'">Share</a>

But when tested in tenon.io, it complains about the empty email address:

Error / prioruty 100% - mailto link that does not have '@' in it

Do we have a workaround for this?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2104

Answers (2)

Karl Groves
Karl Groves

Reputation: 76

Karl Groves here, Founder of Tenon.

Tenon is purposefully opinionated. The goal of the product is to assist website owners in ensuring an accessible user experience. Weighing strict technical conformance vs. user experience is a constant dance. Ultimately the end user may need to choose to ignore some of our guidance.

It is true that the mailto: protocol does not require an email address. And, in the case of @qtgye's link, it is a valid use. If I was @qtgye I'd ignore Tenon's result.

However, we do consider this to be a useful test. In response to this thread, I posted a Twitter poll: https://twitter.com/karlgroves/status/869208982250024960

98% of respondents do expect an email address in a mailto: link. The reason why this is an accessibility issue is that mailto: links will open the user's email client. Users who cannot see the entire screen may assume that the email address is already filled-in on their mail client.

That being said, we do have to take into consideration the fact that the email address is not technically required. Each test in Tenon has a certainty score which, as the name implies, indicates how certain we are that it is a real issue. We will be lowering the certainty score on this test. We are tracking that adjustment as Issue TEN-2573 in our issue tracking system.

Thank you for bringing this up @qtgye

Upvotes: 5

Adam
Adam

Reputation: 18807

The mailto protocol does not require an addr-spec definition. So your link is valid, and this is a false negative.

Upvotes: 1

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