- From: Kelly Ford <Kelly@kellford.com>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 06:18:13 -0700
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Davey, At 09:39 AM 7/15/01 +0900, Davey Leslie wrote: >I mean lower-case 'a' accessible--sites that have proven useable, and hence, >have developed a good reputation among folks using, say, screen-readers. Not >necessarily upper-case tripple-a Acessible with all the validations and >banners and such. Two of the leading factors in improved usability of the web to folks who use screen readers have little to do with compliance to WAI guidelines. They are the ability to cursor directly to the full text of a web page, much like a word processing document, and the resulting decolumnization of tables that is part of this process. These are features found in programs like IBM Home Page Reader, Window-Eyes and JFW. Lynx of course offers some of the decolumnization functionality which I suspect has a lot to do with that program's popularity in some screen reading sectors. Before the features I'm describing existed with the combination of screen readers and graphical browsers, the average screen reading user had to know a lot more about window layouts and how to avoid the clutter of things like menu bars and such. Not to mention multi-columned web pages, which can still be a problem if one's not using access technology that does this decolumnization. The elements of the GUI are not necessarily bad, but rather there just wasn't an easy way to get them out of the way when one wanted to browse a web page in the past. Today, by contrast, load a web page into any of the programs I mentioned and by default all you have access to is the content of the web page. There's nothing to get in the way of getting at the content unless you specifically ask to use a menu and such. To answer your specific question, I would say that web sites that make it easy to separate navigation from content tend to be most usable. Including the "skip nav" option as CNN does is one example. Having a predictable landmark can also be of value. For example after selecting a section of interest on <http://www.nytimes.com> I know that searching for the current date will jump me to the stories in that section. Also, news sites that offer "printer friendly" versions of articles tend to be more usable. Again this is because you can separate the clutter from the content. What's frustrating is when content is broken up with other navigation elements. Typically this is done when you are reading a story and in the middle of the content links to previous articles on the topic are found. You have no easy way to know how much of this clutter is present. Now what would be better in my opinion is finding ways to go beyond these things that happen to work and building an infrastructure that built on the concepts. For example, if you are going to offer a "skip nav" option, why not make it a "hide nav" option. Eliminate the clutter until I ask for it back. Another direction that would help from a blindness perspective in my opinion, is finding ways to bring more structure into web pages. For example if I tell a screen reading user that they are on a list box, or page tab, the majority of folks will know what actions they can take with these elements. I could make a news site significantly more usable if I had a way of putting the content into more structures that screen reading users have been using. For example I could have one list box from which the user selected major sections, another stories from a given section and then the actual content of a given story. Now this wouldn't be very visually appealing so it is unlikely to happen any time soon. I also fully realize that these comments reflect only one population of folks with disabilities. If you are anyone else is interested in discussing more of a user perspective, one forum is a list I run called Webwatch. You can join with a message to webwatch-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Traffic on the list is generally low volume and it too is largely focused on screen reading and screen enlargement users. And in fact you might want to visit <http://www.magnifiers.org> and the list mentioned there if screen enlargement is a sector of interest. Two other good forums for reaching screen reading users are blindtech (blindtech-subscribe@yahoogroups.com) and vicug-l (send a message to listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu with subscribe vicug-l as the text). Blindtech is a high volume list with a hundred messages a day being quite common. Vicug-l is anothert low volume list. Kelly
Received on Monday, 16 July 2001 09:02:16 UTC