Re: FORMAL OBJECTION (was RE: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-204 aria-hidden)

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:10 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
>> If you had an example of an implementation where there *is* a direct
>> relationship (as reported by an implementor with direct knowledge, or
>> based on some form of testing or technical analysis), then that would
>> be very relevant information.
>
> Dragon NaturallySpeaking (http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm):
> This leading speech-to-text software allows sighted, mobility impaired users
> to interact with HTML-rich content via speech input. Nuance/Dragon recommend
> that all links be visible ("obvious to the user"), and that link text be
> unique, so that the user need only say the link text to activate the link,
> however, should that prove to be problematic, the user can also have each
> link enumerated by the software, at which point they speak the "number" of
> the link, and the interaction is then triggered.

I don't think there's a problem here when Dragon NaturallySpeaking is
employed by a user who is not using a screen reader or magnifier since
there's no expectation that users should be able to open these
descriptions. Controls inside them shouldn't be exposed when the
descriptions aren't opened. Obviously, if we wanted to create a
mechanism where any user without specialised AT could open long
descriptions we wouldn't design it the way we've stumbled upon and
around this feature.

Now there could be a problem when Dragon is used in combination with
other AT such as JAWS (as it sometimes is), if the AT was responsible
for rendering an visual overlay. In that case you'd need to ensure the
overlay itself was exposed to the accessibility hierarchy for use by
other AT. The same goes for other interfaces rendered by JAWS such as
the links list.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Tuesday, 14 August 2012 19:22:14 UTC