Product ratings are represented with 1 to 5 stars. Other sites have used inline images; repeating a solid or empty version for each of the five stars. Other sites, such as Yahoo! Shopping, have used a single inline image representing the number of stars.  At best, the image will have an alt attribute that descibes the number of stars. However, the content is locked inside the image. This is an easy approach for coding but isn’t the most accessible approach.

Yahoo! Tech uses the content first approach to design

Content-first design improves accessibility. This approach places the relevant content in semantic markup. It then uses CSS to transform that content into the visual design. Here is a sample rating from Yahoo! Tech: Overall:4/5, Quality:5/5, Support: 3/5. Our CSS transform that simple text into a series of stars and accompanying text. User testing with a screen-reader user led us to remove visual descriptions from the content, i.e."stars" or "bars".

With the content in the page, it was time to look at the visual design.

Ratings are presented in either an unordered list or definition list. We need to place descriptive text in front of the stars and want the stars to be aligned with each other. These considerations lead to using spans with a combination of CSS rules to hide the text, insert a background image, and absolutely position the ratings to the right side of the list item. Let’s look at the code.

The HTML – span

To use a background image for the stars, we need a container that can be manipulated with CSS and not include presentational behaviors of its own. This is why we use the span, a generic inline container. We could use a strong or em, but feel the span offers the best versatility. You never know when the graphic designer will ask for some text to be bolded or emphasized in the same list item.

Sample code for a rating

The span’s title will generate a tooltip when the user places their mouse over the rating (not Internet Explorer). Screen readers’ default settings ignore title attributes on non-form items.

The CSS

Spans are inline elements.  To display background images, we need to make them display block, define a height, width, and move the text off the screen. To keep them inline with the text, we are also positioning them absolutely. We could position them relatively or floated the spans. Position absolute works the best for our pages.The parent list item is positioned relatively to give the span a contextual anchor. Negative text-indent will hide the rating text.


.ratingslist {list-style-type:none;}
.ratingslist li {position:relative; padding:3px 5px; }
.ratingslist li span {text-indent:-1000em; width:66px; display:block; position:absolute; top:5px; right:20px;}


Image sprites display the desired number of stars

The list item is given a class with a number at the end (stars8). This will display an image with four out of five red stars. We are using a scale of 0 to 10 to accomodate half stars. To display other rating variations, we change the modifier, i.e. prostars4, retstars4, bars4, bigstars4, etc…

To simplify the maintenance of the site and reduce server requests; Yahoo! Tech also uses image sprites. Sprites are single images that include multiple icons with a consistent spacing between them. Use background positioning to display the desired chunk of the image. Each sprite represents the possible color variations used on the site: red, blue, and green. Minimizing the color palettes reduces the final image size. For more information on sprites, read CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death by Dave Shea. As a further enhancement, alpha transparent png images are used for most browsers and index-transparent gifs are presented in the Internet Explorer 6 style sheets. 

Background images are positioned with the set of numbers after "no repeat." The horizontal positioning is first. Our sprite is vertical, so we are leaving it alone, hence the 0 value. The vertical positiong comes next. If we want to display 2 out of 5 stars, we need to shift the background down to that part of the image (-530px). Here is the CSS for presenting the specific star variant.


/* Ratings images
======================================= */
.stars0 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -650px;}
.stars1 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -620px;}
.stars2 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -590px;}
.stars3 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -560px;}
.stars4 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -530px;}
.stars5 span {background:url(/images/bg-ratings.png) no-repeat 0 -500px;}
… (repeated for each variation of the stars and bars)


This approach has allowed the Yahoo! Tech engineers to maintain a consistent presentation with minimal markup. For pages that need special tweaks we can easily adjust the positioning by using descending selectors:


#mytech .ratingslist li span { right:5px;}


Caveats

We’ve only found a few small issues with this approach.

• You cannot count on background images being displayed on the printed page. Our print style sheet removes the text-indent and background images to display “Overall: 4/5”.
• When someone includes more than 4 products in the comparison table, the text of some rating parameters will begin to overlap the stars. If they were inline images or if we floated the spans, they may drop to the next line.

Yahoo Tech! ratings are another example of creating accessible and visually dynamic pages by considering the underlying content structure before attacking the styles. Users of all abilities are presented with solid information. That’s how you can deliver a 5 star page every time.

Related Information

• CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death by Dave Shea.
• Making Flash Accessible to Screen Readers
• Standardista Search: Sprites

Congratulations, you’ve probably done some usability testing with an actual screen reader.

For those who put your hands down; here’s the deal-eeo. Screenreaders ignore title attributes by default. Sucks… I know. I’ve been adding really juicy title attributes for usability and they’re being ignored!

Go ahead and duplicate your text

I was doing some user-testing today with Victor Tsaran, the Accessibility Project Manager at Yahoo! He came across a button with link text that was the same as the image. He said, “what’s this going to do?” It was a simple thing like “more info”… But the title attribute said “Visit Joe’s Web Site for more information.” That, he suggested, should have been the link text.

The link text is hidden from the visual users and the title attribute is hidden from the screen readers; so duplicating the information isn’t a bad thing. If you find yourself putting good information in a title attribute for a link that is using image replacement, duplicate the content in the link. It’s that simple. Now, put your hands down, it’s starting to smell musky around here.