How do our SC do when rating these two examples?

I would surely appreciate some feedback if our current success criteria
discriminate between the following two examples, both of which use
largish mouse-over previews.
http://www.netflix.com/BrowseSelection?lnkctr=nmhbs
http://www.si.edu/imax/shows.htm

These were brought to my attention by a colleague who depends upon
screen magnification software.  Her difficulties are similar to those I
have witnessed in my experience working with many low vision clients.  I
would prefer to focus on the SC aimed at addressing low vision, ignoring
other accessibility issues for the sake of argument with these examples.

The problem is that the screen magnification tracks the mouse, so the
visual pop-up is trigger as designed, but then as the screen
magnification user moves the mouse to *read* the pop-up content (since
the new content does not all fit in the magnified view port) the mouse
cursor invariably strays from the triggering target the pop-up content
disappears.  The SI example is actually even more frustrating as the
pop-up content is attached to the mouse cursor so it *moves away* as one
tries to move to the middle of it!

What makes the NetFlix approach acceptable is that each target is also a
link which brings up redundant content.  With the SI example, the
targets are also link, but one gets tangential information (show times)
and not the preview details (as is the case with NetFlix).

This "pop-up preview" seems to be something of a growing trend, so I
think the topic is timely.  Here is a site that promotes the feature
heavily:
http://www.snap.com/

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2007 13:23:14 UTC