RE: APG Landmark Design Pattern Update and Questions related to Banner and Contenting landmarks

+1

From: Léonie Watson [mailto:tink@tink.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 9:21 AM
To: 'Richard Schwerdtfeger' <richschwer@gmail.com>
Cc: 'Gunderson, Jon R' <jongund@illinois.edu>; 'Matt King' <a11ythinker@gmail.com>; 'James Nurthen' <james.nurthen@oracle.com>; public-aria@w3.org
Subject: RE: APG Landmark Design Pattern Update and Questions related to Banner and Contenting landmarks

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:richschwer@gmail.com]
Sent: 11 February 2016 16:03
"Freedom Scientific guidance on navigation web pages talks about starting with landmarks."

Which makes sense. The first thing I want to know about a web page, is what the major parts of it are. As Birkir described, it's the equivalent of a quick glance at the page to get a sense of its layout.

Freedom Scientific uses the term "region" to describe landmarks. Here is how they describe them in their Surf's UP training [1]:

" ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) regions can be used to add additional navigation structure to Web pages. Web page authors can add regions to Web pages to make it easier to find the main parts of a page. For example, you might find a main region which is where the main content of a page begins. You may also find banner, navigation, and search regions on some Web pages."

Note the phrase "find the main parts of a page". There is no mention of hierarchy, only of navigating to different significant parts of a page. This is exactly the interaction that has been described by others on this topic (not all of whom use Jaws).

"The right solution is to educate the British Association of the Blind as to what landmarks are and how they are used vs. having the tail wag the dog."

We can certainly educate people about using a particular feature. I seriously doubt we can (or should) tell them how to think about it though!

We've heard from developers, implimentors and users (from lots of different places), all of whom seem to think landmarks are about identifying and navigating to parts of a page, not about providing a table of contents.

Léonie.


--
@LeonieWatson tink.uk Carpe diem

[1] http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-Up/Navigating.htm