- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 18:07:23 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Scott Luebking <phoenixl@netcom.com>
- cc: poehlman@clark.net, sweetent@home.com, unagi69@concentric.net, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Scott, this sounds like precisely the kind of function that led the authors of HTML to include provision for something like <LINK rel="Help" href="aboutEverything" hreflang="en"> This works very well on such hi-tech browsers as Lynx, and does not require any magic popups. It is documented in the HTML 4.0 spcification fairly clearly. If this had been implemented by the people who agreed that it should be part of a recommendation, or asked for before people went off into proprietary solutions, we would have a very simple method of getting help about pages. (It is still in the spec...) Charles McCN On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Scott Luebking wrote: Hi, Charles If you forgive me, your analysis is missing a point. I've been using a very rough efficiency analysis method of keypress counting. In many cases, using a key to trigger an explanation is more efficient than using a link. (It's something that sighted people can overlook.) How many keystrokes would it take a blind person to find and activate the link? It depends on where the link is and where the blind user is focused. However, in all most all instances, by the time the blind user gets to the link and activates it, the number of keypresses is greater than the one used to pop up a window with the information. Also, since the targetted user is blind, the issues of font size, style, etc, aren't important so there's little benefit to using another web page. The browser is based on interactivity. The trick is to use the interactivity to benefit the user without being intrusive. It's kind of what I tell the students I work with that a good interface is like a good butler. The butler helps you perform the tasks you want and can often anticipate your needs while at the same time being as minimally intrusive with few demands. Scott > If the pop-up were an ordinary link to an explanation of how this site works, > it would be interoperable back to the CERN line-mode browser (which actually > came after the graphical one that Tim started with, but...) > > Which is why some sites do explain how they work. Using something > interoperable like a normal hypertext link. > > People like Jonathan Chetwynd have been reminding us that interactivity is > very important to making content accessible to some people. > > My point is to recognise that interactivity is good for some people, and can > be bad for others - the challenge is to reconcile the two. It's not a very > amazing point, and other people have made it better. > > Charles McCN --Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA
Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 18:08:30 UTC