RE: Key actions for this month

As I am not fluent in ARIA or JSON I have significant difficulties assessing the proposal as the examples shown do not mean a lot to me. Taking things to a more conceptual level I would like to understand how “importance” is being handled.

The “Importance” section says that identifying and differentiating between critical features, medium features and less important features of a web page “need to be defined as important from a user perspective”. I totally agree with this. But, if I understand things (and the nice clothes shopping demo) correctly, the display of “more” or “less” options is based on the “importance” of various aspects of the page contents based on the web author’s assessment of their “importance”. This assessment would be based on a statistical analysis of usage of a feature.

If I understand the idea correctly the web author’s “importance” assessment would be based on an understanding on what percentage of the users use a feature. Although this statistical approach might be adequate for some features (i.e. probably a very small percentage of users will be interested in “Investors” feature, the real “importance” of a feature would be a highly personal experience. For example, at a clothes shopping site I would guess that 60% of the visitors might be women, and 40% men. So based on the draft, these would both have a “high” ARIA importance. But, at a personal level men’s clothes would be “high” for me but women’s clothes would be “low” (I am not brave or stupid enough to try to shop for clothes for my wife). The sample Demo script includes the “Sports” option in the initial and “Less options” states – because the web author has rated its importance as “high”. This is fine for me, but “Sports” is a “low” priority for my wife.

So my question is whether the ARIA importance approach is really delivering personalization. To me it is providing a simplification mechanism that might be beneficial in some contexts. However, my fear is that it might also create site simplifications that are very unhelpful to many customers  as it will remove options that are important to them. This type of “personalization” would be very unhelpful for anyone with atypical preferences.

Many Autistic Spectrum users have their own intense interests and these may often be far removed from typical interests! Their unusual favourite interests would always be removed as soon as they attempts to simplify a complicated site.

Best regards

Mike

From: lisa.seeman [mailto:lisa.seeman@zoho.com]
Sent: 07 October 2015 07:31
To: public-cognitive-a11y-tf <public-cognitive-a11y-tf@w3.org>
Subject: Key actions for this month

Hi Folks

Let us review the ARIA proposal in time for TPAC later this month. Please take a look and we will discuss it on Fridays call.
See https://rawgit.com/w3c/coga/master/issue-papers/links-buttons.html


Also WCAG has asked us to have a draft they can review by the end of the month. So also take a look at
https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/cognitive-a11y-tf/wiki/Proposal_for_WCAG



All the best

Lisa Seeman

Athena ICT Accessibility Projects <http://accessibility.athena-ict.com>
LinkedIn<http://il.linkedin.com/in/lisaseeman/>, Twitter<https://twitter.com/SeemanLisa>