RE: Visible controls - Design canvas exception

I agree this comes down to what is the signifier of the availability of invisible components.  The identifier of the component itself may or may not be enough as David mentions.   What a control does is a separate but related issue.  For example, on iOS I get a missed call notification – I assume tapping on it will take me to the missed call details – but instead tapping on it places a phone call.

Text can be a signifier in certain contexts like menus or when it has a different background, or is placed outside of a block of text – but this can be problematic for some where reading and interpreting whether the text contains a verb is an issue.  It’s also an issue as discussed when similar text acts as a link in one place but in another it acts as an expand control such as in your menu example.  I think this comes back to David’s primary action theme.  Some components by nature have a primary action that discloses invisible actions and in that case the standard signifier is acceptable – but in other cases where there are dual actions or where the primary action – e.g. text only doesn’t match then it’s an issue.  This does in some ways take us back to where we started.

Is knowing that all non-grayed out items in a menu are actionable enough regardless of knowing what the action will do?  That is – if you know the item has an action associated with whether it is to perform an action or to expand more items you at least know it is actionable.  Knowing what will occur next is a separate but still important aspect.  But when items don’t look actionable at all yet have actions on hover/focus the user doesn’t know to even try that route.

Jonathan

From: David MacDonald <david@can-adapt.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2022 6:21 AM
To: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Cc: Wilco Fiers <wilco.fiers@deque.com>; WCAG list <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Visible controls - Design canvas exception

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Hi Alastair

I agree these are tough edge cases and we can expect an array of results on pass/fail on some of these (low inter-rater reliability).

However, for me the big takeaway from this exercise is the concept of "primary function" of the control.

- The usual category of failure of this SC would be when there is nothing there at all identifying that there is a popup, and you discover it by hovering around.
- Then there will be a category of failures where the text, image or icon has another primary purpose which can be confusing for some users.
- Then there will be some squishy ones, where we need to carve out exceptions around known conventions (i.e, considerations for these could be hovering over a video, table editing, or perhaps a tile)


Cheers,
David MacDonald



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On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 9:04 AM Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com<mailto:acampbell@nomensa.com>> wrote:
Hi David,

I won’t comment on whether I agree or not (I think it will be a survey question soon), but to clarify some of the examples:


> 6) its a menu, text identifies the popup content

What about the items in the same menu that don’t have a pop-out menu? (E.g. comments.) How can it be an indicator when it works, but not an indicator when it doesn’t have the pop-up?


> 8) tick control: the purpose of the image is to be selected

If you click on the image (not the tick), the image opens full screen, so I’d say the selection-ticks are not the primary purpose.


> 9) Hover over thumbnail to play. Pass because thats a primary purpose

Play is one option, but it also has ‘edit’, ‘select’ and ‘more options’ controls, do they pass as well?


> 12) Fail: Heading text has a different primary purpose

It is also functionally a link and takes you to a ‘show all’ for that category, so it is multi-purpose.
(I think it’s a band-aid feature making up for the headings not looking like links.)


13) Hovering over initials in Teams: I think we need a convention that if there is a headshop or initials, that interacting with that head shot will tell you more about them.

I’d also argue that hovering over rows in a table (the next two) to show more options is a convention.


> 16) Edit a table

The last example is tricky, you get some controls on-hover (on the left), but clicking into the cells allows editing.

Thanks for reviewing the examples, I’ll update the notes around them.

-Alastair