Re: Exploration - 'pin' for Thursday's Meeting

Simon, you raise a really key point and something that I've been  
acutely aware of since joining Opera.

Discoverability is key and features are as good as redundant if they  
are not evident. I like the idea of highlighting features as a user  
comes cross them. Our implementation of Mouse Gestures [1] does this  
when the browser registers that you have performed a move in line with  
Mouse Gestures. There is a fine line to overloading the user however.

I agree with you that users rarely go to the manuel to find features.  
We implemented Discover Opera [2] for more generic feature discovery  
(Speed Dial, Sessions, Skins, Search) and I think this would be  
interesting to do for accessibility related information. Ideas about  
how to do this are:

1. Customisation of accessibility features available from the side  
panel in Opera.
2. Prompts when you set up the browser to customise it (scale, font,  
colours, icon size, pre-defined style sheets etc).

I'm not sure if what you describe is exactly covered by UAAG but think  
it;s worth discussing in one of our calls.

Cheers, Henny

[1] http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/gestures/
[2] http://portal1.opera.com/discover/


On 5 Aug 2009, at 16:45, Kim Patch wrote:

> I agree that this is incredibly important, and something that has  
> always been sorely lacking. This may be getting too far into  
> implementation details, but if you think about the learning process,  
> it often includes organizing and highlighting. It would be very  
> different experience if you could always easily discover, modify,  
> organize and share interface controls.
>
> Cheers,
> Kim
>
> Simon Harper wrote:
>>
>> I think one of the more important things that we may be missing is  
>> the ability of users to self-explore the interface and UA+Content  
>> aspects of the interface. Many blind users who I talk with often  
>> state that they explore incrementally and don't refer much to the  
>> accessible manuals.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Si.
>>
>> =======================
>>
>> Simon Harper
>> University of Manchester (UK)
>>
>> Human Centred Web Lab: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk
>>
>> My Site: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/harper/
>>
>> My Diary (Web): http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/harper/phpicalendar/week.php
>> My Diary (Subscribe): http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/diaries/harper/SimonHarper.ics
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>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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> ___________________________________________________
>
> Kimberly Patch
> President
> Redstart Systems, Inc., makers of Utter Command
> (617) 325-3966
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>
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-- 
Henny Swan
Web Evangelist
Member of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Education and Outreach Group
www.opera.com/developer

Personal blog: www.iheni.com

Stay up to date with the Web Standards Curriculum www.opera.com/wsc

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 16:18:01 UTC