Re: Switches and Universal Access

On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Jonathan Chetwynd wrote:

> Does anyone on the list regularly checks their pages for 'switch*'
> accessibility?

What's that?
(Quoted from the bottom of the original message:)

> *switch as it sounds means a physical switch, two work more easily, if
> the user is able. One is used to scan, i.e. mimic the tab button, the
> other to click, usually mimicking the enter button.

I think I'm not the only one here who doesn't understand what that means.

Making my best guess at present, I'd say that the question is about
keyboard-only accessibility, just using special techniques to cause or
simulate keyboard events. I guess those techniques are something that an
author need not worry about; if the page can be used using tabbing and
Enter key, it can also be used in an environment where hitting TAB or
Enter means using some special device. For tabbing to work, the order of
the links should be a natural one, and for Enter to work, links should be
normal links, not some JavaScript or other simulations of links. In this
case, I would say that the tabbing part is not perfect, since the order of
the links on the screen does not correspond to their order in HTML source
and hence in the tabbing order.

> Our site http://www.peepo.com is fully switch accessible, however many
> of the resources we link to, are not.

Viewed on a graphic browser, it's just a collection of enigmatic images.
Are the letters intentionally hidden until tabbed to or otherwise focused
on?

I'm sure that most of us, including the majority of people who cannot read
normally, would benefit from some textual explanations attached to the
images, if they are meant to be understood and even used as links.
And a short verbal explanation of what the page is about, even if not
understood by all visitors, would probably not hurt.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 03:18:06 UTC