- From: Ben Caldwell <caldwell@trace.wisc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:39:08 -0600
- To: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>
- CC: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Jason White wrote: > On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 12:45:41PM -0600, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote: >>Also - the question is how helpful. And why couldn't AT be programmed to >>allow users to get information around a link with a simple keystroke for >>those cases where the link all by itself did not give them enough >>information. > > Do GUI screen readers make this hard? Under all of the Unix text browsers I > use, and with both braille and speech assistive technologies it's trivial to > read the line containing the link, the lines before and after, etc. As a > result, this has never struck me as a concern. At most it's a couple of > seconds of extra work to read the context. I tend to read the text of > unfamiliar pages anyway, rather than just reading links, so for my usage > pattern the problem rarely arises. With familiar pages I use the "text search" > function of whichever user agent I'm running to get straight to the desired > point without having to navigate to it. > > I suspect it's the kind of problem that affects some user agent/assistive > technology combinations more than others, and some people more than others. My understanding is that reading the text that surrounds a link in GUI screen readers is not at all difficult. It is true that when a user pulls up a list of links on a page, surrounding text would no longer be available, but I don't believe this is something we should be concerned with as this is a case of a UA feature that re-displays the content outside of its original context. David, can you clarify where you recommend including this? I assume your proposed text (Provide meaningful link text, unless the link is part of an array of links to different versions (or views) of the same information.) is a technique, but it is phrased like a success criterion. If the former, would this be advisory or sufficient? -Ben
Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:39:19 UTC