Re: browser support for heading navigation

Visible heading navigation should be part of UAAG 2.0 at Level A.  The
Document Outline features of HTML 5 should also be visible as views in
browsers.  Visual readers with low vision are often distracted by even
the lowest verbosity settings of screen readers. It is pretty hard to
concentrating on read with compromised eyes, but a jabbering program
in the background can make it impossible.  I have actually used screen
readers with the sound turned off, just to get to the heading
navigation.

The average person with low vision who reads visually gets between 25
to 100 words per page per screen-- one viewport, now wasted space.
That makes scrolling down a serious problem.  Visual heading and
document outline maps provided by the browser would be a god send.

Add-ons and extensions are nice, but they have a high fatality rate,
and each time a browser upgrades your workflow hits the skids.   I've
convinced myself, heading and document outline maps should be part of
browsers a UAAG 2.0 requirement.

Wayne Dick

On 8/31/11, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Christophe Strobbe wrote:
>>
>> The list of keyboard shortcuts for Opera 11.10 does not list
>> shortcuts for navigating headings :
>> <http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.10/en/keyboard.html>. The tutorial
>> "Use Opera without a mouse" states that you can use the keys W and S
>> to navigate to the previous and next header [sic!] on the page:
>> <http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/>. Unfortunately,
>> this tutorial is not referenced by the page with keyboard shortcut
>> and the keys don't work if you don't enable them in the preferences
>> (the tutorial does not tell you that; see
>> <http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201003/heading_navigation_in_web
>> _browsers/>
>> for the instructions).
>
> Hi Christophe,
>
> That's not good.  I am BCC'ing my Opera Posse to see if that can't be
> addressed more elegantly.
>
>
>>
>> Other browsers, with larger "market shares" than Opera, don't support
>> heading navigation.
>> There are a few extensions for Firefox, but they are either aimed at
>> mouse users or outdated.
>
> Mozilla's rapid release schedule is breaking lots of extensions/plugins,
> which is a PITA.  For the slightly more adventurous, hacking plug-ins to
> work in next-release Firefox builds is not that hard, although it is a HACK
> and done AT YOUR OWN RISK; I CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY NEGATIVE
> OUTCOMES. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
>
> HOW TO:
>
> 1) Download and SAVE the .xpi file (the Firefox plug-in installer file)
> 2) Change the file extension from .xpi to .zip
> 3) Expand the zip file and find the 'install.rdf' file
> 4) Open install.rdf in a text editor, and look for <em:maxVersion>, change
> the value to the current browser version (i.e., update it from 5.* to 6.*,
> or whatever)
> 5) Save the file, reinsert it into the original zip, then rename the
> file.zip back to file.xpi
> 6) Double click on the .xpi file and it should initiate the 'new'
> installation
>
> REPEATING FOR THE HARD OF READING - THIS IS A HACK, AND DOING SO IS AT YOUR
> OWN RISK; I CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY NEGATIVE OUTCOMES. YOU HAVE BEEN
> WARNED!
>
> That said, I have had to do this to a few of my more favorite plugins
> (including the Mozilla Accessibility Extensions/FAE toolbar), usually within
> hours of my 'forced' FireFox update, and so far it has all gone well.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> JF
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 21:48:38 UTC