- From: T. V. Raman <tvraman@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 08:47:21 -0800 (PST)
- To: Kelly Ford <kford@teleport.com>
- Cc: tvraman@explorer.almaden.ibm.com, "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <unagi69@concentric.net>, WAI Interest Group Emailing List <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, User Agent Guidelines Emailing List <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
as an example of what I mean look at the following lines extracted from your message: Children's Audiobooks, Music, Science & Space... Now, when you land on "audio books" --how do you know that that's children's audio books without feeling around the screen? For instance say you search for occurrences of "audio books" on the page-- you hit the string "audio books" multiple times, and each time you have to look both at the line above (or possibly below) to put it in context. This in itself does not sound too bad-- but realize that the fact that the "children's" landed up in the line immediately above "audio books" was pure accident --and something that could change if the Yahoo site decided to change from being row-oriented to column-oriented in their table design. Equally, the proximity of "children's" to "audio books" is a function of whether the screenreader decides to decolumnize using row major or column major order. >>>>> "Kelly" == Kelly Ford <kford@teleport.com> writes: Kelly> Hi, >> Also, most layout-oriented sites only manage to turn into a >> different form of gibberish when decolumnized in this way >the issue gets especially bad with nested tables where the >decolumnizing gets even more ad-hock. > >As an example, try >the various yahoo sites e.g. broadcast, loans etc. > Kelly> Could you provide some clarification on what you Kelly> mean here. Below is part of the text as Kelly> decolumnized by both JFW with Internet Explorer Kelly> and Lynx. Of course missing here are the numbers Kelly> Lynx could insert or the word Link before each Kelly> line below but basically each line below is a Kelly> link. Kelly> My impression of this page, like much of the main Kelly> Yahoo Index, is that you have a basic category Kelly> name and then some subcategories under that Kelly> category. The pattern is terminated with a link Kelly> that has several periods, which is an indication Kelly> that the next link will be a major category. To Kelly> me this is very readable and functional. Kelly> The other sections of the page are links to live Kelly> events today and are equally readable to me. Kelly> I'm not saying readable to Kelly equals Kelly> accessible. But of the hundreds of people who Kelly> are Blind I've worked with on internet access, Kelly> Yahoo has been a favorite site because people Kelly> find it functional. ***Begin cut from Kelly> http://broadcast.yahoo.com*** AudioBooks Author Kelly> Interviews, New Releases... CD Jukebox Listening Kelly> Parties... Video Educational, Movies, TV Kelly> Series... Radio Local, Shows... TV Local, Kelly> Networks, News, Weather... Broadband Movies, Kelly> Music, TV Shows... Kelly> Business Events, Industries, Investing, Kelly> Leadership... Careers & Employment jobs.com, Kelly> Resumes... Children's Audiobooks, Music, Science Kelly> & Space... -- Best Regards, --raman ------------------------------------------------------------ IBM Research: Human Language Technologies Phone: 1 (408) 927 2608 Email: tvraman@us.ibm.com WWW: http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman PGP: http://cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.asc Snail: IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road San Jose 95120
Received on Wednesday, 17 November 1999 11:42:29 UTC