Re: DHTML show/hide sections & screen readers

There is a system inside Windows called narrator - look at start ->  
program files -> accessories -> accessibility

(Yep, it's an accessory. What colour would you like your access? :-)

That isn't a fullblown screen reader, but is meant to be enough for users  
to navigate basic stuff, so should give you a rough idea if you navigate  
windows explorer with the keyboard.

Yep, these things have some kind of text with them. They are used in Web  
interfaces to things like CMS systems. Bad things people do: Rely on  
javascript, and not provide alt, which are both simple enoughto fix. Also  
most of them is they are really small. So you can be left trying to  
navigate through a huge stream of them with a keyboard, or get the mouse  
over the right 10 pixel square. It can also be pretty hard to see what  
state they are in from the icon itself. And if they say "expand, expand,  
expand, close, close, close, close, expand, close close, expand" it is  
hard to figure out what the action is, if they read out what they do it to  
it is really verbose and slow...

There is some discussion of this in the Authoring Tool Accessibility  
Guidelines group's archive from late 1999, but i can't look it up right  
now. http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU for those who want to see what is and isn't  
news.

cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 16 May 2005 11:07:59 +0200, Rebecca Cox  
<Rebecca.Cox@intergen.co.nz> wrote:

> Think this is getting a bit too involved to figure out without sitting  
> next to someone and having a look / listen, but what happens with the  
> + to expand and - to close folders in Windows
> Explorer & a screen reader? Do they have a sort of alt or title-like  
> text read out?
-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Monday, 16 May 2005 11:26:27 UTC