RE: Invisible elements for additional link text [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

Hi Deborah,

Thanks for testing that, it is both interesting and concerning.

I guess this is where Conformance Requirement 4 kicks in, i.e. providing another way for these users to access the information. By a stroke of luck when we're using an 'article summary' technique like this we generally have the article heading linked as well which would provide a way to get to the full version.

Leon

-----Original Message-----
From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net [mailto:deborah.kaplan@suberic.net] 
Sent: Friday, 14 September 2012 12:08 AM
To: Harry Loots
Cc: Joe Chidzik; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Invisible elements for additional link text [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

I was the person who sent the original e-mail mentioning Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so to answer a few questions and clear a couple of misconceptions:

1. On the test page I just created
(<http://suberic.net/~deborah.kaplan/foo.html>) and tested with NaturallySpeaking 11.5 and Internet Explorer 9, Opera 12, and Firefox 15, it was never as easy as these usual disambiguating numbers next to the links. Internet Explorer insisted on the full invisible name of the link being dictated -- even though that is invisible to the screen -- and could not disambiguate between two of these links which had identical text; it always choose the first selection. Opera could hear the names of the links but refused to select any of them, and Firefox was just thoroughly confused. So for Dragon user to reach any of these links it would be MORE difficult then it would be for them to reach a page that didn't have the invisible text. Dictating the names of the links would fail, and the Dragon user would have *no idea why*.

Yes, she could access the links by other means (voice tabbing or voice mouse control, for example), but this would be after repeatedly trying to dictate the name of the link.

I'm going to run more tests on this when I have more time, because if this is accurate it is going to make me stop recommending this technique for partial link text.

In any case, in my opinion, this fails 3.2, predictability.

2. I would hope that anyone who uses the tooltip solution suggested earlier makes sure that tooltip is also activated on tab as well as mouse over, otherwise we come back to a solution which is broken for Dragon users.

-Deborah
--
Deborah Kaplan
accessibility team co-lead
dreamwidth Studios LLC

Received on Thursday, 13 September 2012 23:35:46 UTC