RE: ARIA AT Video Demo

Sina,

 

My feeling is the doctor appointment form is aligned perfectly with lived experience and does an excellent job of conveying gravity, so I do think it could be enduring example that grabs attention extremely well.

 

1. It works for any culture.
2. Access to health care is a top of mind concern globally.
3. Not being able to complete the form is an obvious, heart-stopping problem.
4. A select is a perfectly appropriate widget for such an input. Whether a select or a radio is used in a given circumstance is generally a visual presentation issue that depends on the rest of the context. In general, selects and radio groups for short sets of options are functionally identical. Selects have obvious accessibility advantages, e.g., first-letter selection, but that is immaterial in this conversation.

 

Best,

Matt

 

From: Sina Bahram <sina@sinabahram.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 2, 2022 10:57 PM
To: 'Boaz Sender' <boaz@bocoup.com>; 'James Scholes' <james@pac.bz>
Cc: public-aria-at@w3.org
Subject: RE: ARIA AT Video Demo

 

Thanks for all the work on thinking through this. I unfortunately do see issues with this approach to answer your question. Thank you for asking it.

 

1. I do  not feel this conveys the difficulties I, James, and others face as screen reader users. It’s my understanding that a pretty long voice conversation has already occurred where James enumerated concerns.
2. I don’t think this represents a real world use case in terms of UI component usage. This feels way more like radio button territory and not a listbox/combobox implementation. Even if it is, it’s barely a toy example and it feels quite contrived to me, which hurts our chances of being heard and taken seriously IMHO. I think the example needs to match both the reality and criticality of the real world experiences we want to prevent.
3. I don’t believe this conveys the import of the matter at hand. Something far more critical like voting, a COVID test, question on an exam, a legal question with real world implications, and a myriad other examples all immediately come to mind as having far more weight. This isn’t just an opinion, both James and I are speaking from decades of lived experience being frustrated by web interfaces, and I just want to reiterate that I think lots of specifics have already been conveyed via a voice channel so I’m not repeating them here in the interests of time, but happy to discuss alternate approaches.
4. I don’t believe this will resonate as much with the general public, or let’s say the general web designer/developer/denizen public like so many other examples would, especially those in which we can make someone experience the actual pain of a long list being enumerated or tabs not working to switch to a critical screen to pay your taxes or expandable controls not working to convey life-saving information about how to take care of your child from the CDC or similar websites, etc.

 

I hope that helps contextualize some of my concerns.

 

Thanks again for all the work on this.

 

Take care,

Sina

 

President, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.

Phone: 919-345-3832

https://www.PAC.bz

Twitter: @SinaBahram

Personal Website:  <https://www.sinabahram.com> https://www.sinabahram.com

 

From: Boaz Sender <boaz@bocoup.com <mailto:boaz@bocoup.com> > 
Sent: Wednesday, February 2, 2022 12:49 PM
To: James Scholes <james@pac.bz <mailto:james@pac.bz> >
Cc: Sina Bahram <sina@sinabahram.com <mailto:sina@sinabahram.com> >; public-aria-at@w3.org <mailto:public-aria-at@w3.org> 
Subject: Re: ARIA AT Video Demo

 

That's right this is the select-only-combo box. I also originally thought a long list would make more sense because I thought there was a type ahead box, but this is the one that only has select options.

 

Based on this thread, we're going to go forward with the select-only-combox with 3-4 items in it in the context of a doctors office.

 

Please let me know if you see any issue with that.

 

Thanks!

--

Boaz Sender

He / Him

UTC-8

My normal emailing hours might not be yours. Don't feel obligated to respond if you receive this at an odd time.

 

 

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 7:08 PM James Scholes <james@pac.bz <mailto:james@pac.bz> > wrote:

Note that we're discussing select-only comboboxes for this demo, which don't work on macOS Safari plus VO.  E.g.:
https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/examples/combobox/combobox-select-only.html

In other words, the ARIA version of a native HTML select.

Regards,

James Scholes
Director of Digital Accessibility, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.

On 31/01/2022 at 8:33 pm, Sina Bahram wrote:
> IMHO, as described, this is a listbox, not a combobox as it does not provide any editing. Also, for a list of three items, it may not convey the reasons for the criticality of such a component being done correctly. A list of states would at least provide a large enough list where things like first letter navigation, type ahead, and so forth are critical e.g. I just type ‘N’ followed by ‘O’ to land on North Carolina in such lists instead of arrowing dozens of times. When they are broken, I can’t do that, so it quite literally takes orders of magnitude more time to complete that micro-task.
> 
>  
> 
> Important to note that I’m still describing a listbox above. For it to be a combobox, we would want editing to occur within the field along with iteration e.g. the address bar in your browser is a combobox, as are search fields with autocomplete, and so forth.
> 
>  
> 
>  
>