Re: Possible draft of 3.2.7

Hi Sarah,

My understanding is that at least some of the conventions outlined in the definition are not sufficient for the user-need. Happy to be corrected on that by others from COGA, but that is what I’ve heard previously.

Also, I don’t think we can rely on convention as a measure without some sort of catalogue of approved examples. (Conventions vary by person, cultural groups, domain knowledge, countries etc.) It wouldn’t just be a convention for “interactivity”, in this scenario it needs to be a convention of showing more controls, which is more specific.

As a side note – the 1st exception included multi-step process so authors wouldn’t be penalised for including short-cuts. E.g. the list of emails in Gmail might have on-hover short-cuts, but those options are also available on the individual email page.

Also, the 1st part of the proposal doesn’t restrict the scope to controls that appear on-hover/focus. As written it would apply to all controls, which isn’t the intent.

Kind regards,

-Alastair



From: Suzanne Taylor
Maybe…

Success Criterion 3.2.7 Temporarily Visible Controls (Level AA): Provide a visible indicator that is available without mouse or keyboard focus for each control or set of controls, except when:

  *   The same functionality is available through another control or set of controls on the same screen; (The COGA guidance indicates that users want to know what’s available to them, so avoiding going through an entire process to find the features is important, so I dropped the multi-step process part of this one.)
  *   The temporarily visible controls appear with any action on the page (including mouse over) and remain visible for at least 3 seconds
  *   A mechanism is available to make temporarily visible controls persistently visible;
  *   The temporarily visible controls provide keyboard-only functionality and appear on keyboard focus;
  *   The controls are part of a user interface for editing what is shown persistently and the user interface includes a help section that explains this;
  *   Hiding the visible indicator is essential to the purpose of the page.

And then perhaps define “visible indicator”:

Visible indicator: Visuals designed to indicate interactivity through either known conventions for indicating interactivity (e.g. outlined button, image of a video, profile pic, underlined links, submenu arrows), or through new conventions used within a particular set of Web pages (e.g. everything interactive within an online game is surrounded by a purple halo; everything you can edit in a drawing application has mini mouse pointer in the bottom right).