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Popups!
This could be one that appears after a short while to check you are still there, or asks if you are sure you want to leave. It could be a simple form or a chatbot.
Popups, or modals as they are technically called, are used by almost everyone in digital marketing.
I expect you are thinking that I hate modals, I am going to say how bad they are and how you shouldn’t use them?
Well, I’m not.
Why?
Well, let’s think about what a pop-up is used for.
What do they need to do?
They need to draw the visitor’s attention to somewhere on the screen and give them information, perhaps with a button to click on, to action something.
So, you want to alert your visitor and you want to use a pop-up to do it?
This is fine.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with alerting someone, it is just that you need to alert everyone.
So, for example, most of us can see a pop-up appear on the screen.
However, if we can’t see the screen, we do not know it is there. Not a problem, you can code your pop-up so that when it appears, it also sends an alert message to someone using a screen reader!
They know immediately what your message is and, in a way, it is even clearer because that message is read to them directly without any other distractions.
You use ARIA Labels to do things like this but I do not want to get any more technical in this post.
Remember, this also applies to any error messages that appear when your form is validated.
99% of the time, they do not alert screen-readers when they could do so, with a bit more coding!
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