Accessible Image Tab Rollovers

In the beginning it was to overcome a specific problem. Now it’s there just for the joy of web developers everywhere.

“The essence of Pixy’s Fast Rollovers involves creating one image for each navigation item that includes normal, hover and active states stacked on top of each other. Later, we’ll use CSS to change the background-position to reveal each state at the appropriate time.Figure 1.1 on the right shows an example image that I’ve created and used for Fast Company’s new navigation. Each state is 20px tall with a total image height of 60px. The top 20px is the normal state, the next 20px shows the hover state and final 20px shows the active state (which is also used for the “you are here” effect). There are similar images for each tab we’d like to use.

Using one image for each state allows us to toss out ugly Javascript and instead make use of simple CSS rules for hover effects. This is good. It also eliminates the “flicker” effect that other CSS methods suffer from, where separate on/off images are used. This is good. We also don’t have to pre-load any additional images. Again… this is good.

The CSS: This is Where the Magic Happens

First we’ll set up the rules that all navigation items will need. This will save us from writing duplicate rules for each tab. Then we’ll add a separate rule for each list item id, giving the li it’s own background-image and width — the only two variables that will be different for each tab.”

Read the full article from SimpleBits.