RE: Proposal with updates from 26 May call

Ineke van der Maat wrote:

> hello John,
> 
> You wrote:
> Guide to GL 3.1 L3 SC7
> 
> A spoken version of text content is available.
> 
> 
> HHmm ... http://www.bonn.de has a spoken version produced by 
> a voice service in Sweden... the spoken German is so bad that 
> disability organisations complain.. but they offer an spoken 
> version as required in these guidelines..

I have another counter-example: http://www.stichtingmeerzicht.nl/index2.htm

This is a website from a Dutch foundation that works for the blind. In my
personal opinion, they did everything someone without knowledge about web
accessibility would do to make their website accessible, making a lot of
beginner mistakes. One of the problems is that they created spoken versions
of their buttons that are spoken out loud on mouse-over (they cannot receive
keyboard focus), interfering with screen readers. However, since not many
blind people will use a mouse, I guess that's not really a problem though
but the spoken text is not available for the intended audience. There's also
no way to turn it the speech off, and sometimes the text continues to be
read after you select something else, so two voices are reading at once.

If we do want a success criterion about spoken versions of text, I think we
should include that it has to be the user's choice, i.e.: "The user can
select a spoken version of text content" or something similar.

Yvette Hoitink
Heritas, Enschede, the Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl
WWW: http://www.heritas.nl 

Received on Friday, 27 May 2005 16:28:28 UTC