Re: Interactive use of the WWW

Jaap,

Good to hear from you.  Your comments on interactive pages were discussed
in the working group telecon yesterday and I took the action to write up
the discussion.

At 08:07 PM 3/15/99 +0100, jaap van lelieveld wrote:
>Dear readers,
>Unfortunately I will nog be able to join the coming GL meeting.
>I think the current documents cover the needs of regular HTML
>readers.
>
>One item though, that is mentioned several times, is not really
>solved properly. This concerns interactive aspect of WWW usage.
>More and more sites use JavaScripting for this.
>I'd be happy if some guidelines could be added to regulate
>scripting. 
>
>Problems:
>- Instability of the screen becuse of moving objects (already mentioned
>  but from a different view point).
>- In many cases Javascript-based links behave different than 
>  HTML links. How can this be avoided.
>- Links sometimes have strange names: the names of the scripting
>  routines they belong to. How can this be avoided.
>- Because of scripting requirements links show up in the tab
>  order that are no real links. They are only needed for
>  technical reasons. How can these "hidden links" be
>  avoided or how can they be recognized by the screen
>  reader (and rejected as irrelevant) or by the user?
>

We believe most of these concerns are addressed by the checkpoints under
"Guideline 6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform
 gracefully."  However, when it comes to spurious stopping places in the
tabbing sequence, the User Agent guidelines are involved, too.  The User
Agent working group is developing guidelines on navigation inside the page
that address knowing what places to stop and where not to stop.  For
suitable navigation stops, including genuine links, the Web Content
guidelines require them to be self-explanatory, to let you know why you are
stopping there.

Some unnecessary anchor tags are indeed placed around scripts to make the
pages work with current browsers.  This is discussed in 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JanMar/0322.html>.
When the browsers implement the User Agent guidelines this misuse of markup
will no longer be necessary.

Al

>I do hope you see my point.
>Since more and more sites require interaction this
>problem is becoming more and more important.
>
>Best regards,
>Jaap
>
>Message from: Jaap van Lelieveld      The Netherlands
>              Chairman of EBU commission on Technical Devices and Services
>E-mail:       Jaap.van.Lelieveld@inter.nl.net
>
>USING: YARN V0.92 as an offline reader, and
>       UQWK / OLMENU under UNIX for mail and news transfer
>

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 1999 09:07:23 UTC