Use of progressive disclosure in "How People with Disabilities Use the Web"

Dear editors,

As discussed earlier with Shadi i submit my comments / thoughts on the 
use of progressive disclosure on pages like "How People with 
Disabilities Use the Web".

Generally I think progressive disclosure (PD) is a very valuable 
technique to make pages and applications more usable and scanable. 
People can focus on the parts or tasks they are interested in.

But I'm not sure if we could improve the PWD-Use-Web-pages ...

Will our readers be interested more in certain sections or in reading 
the core-content of a page in general? I think - compared to the 
WCAG-guidelines where one is probably more often than not interested in 
just a certain piece of information - people might want to read through 
those pages, at least to get a general impression of the topic.

Generally I think the initially visible content should be a balanced and 
informative document, not just one sentence of introduction and a number 
of headlines.

But PD might of course be of value on these pages as well.

eg:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/2009/scenarios

Here I would collapse just the further-reading sections (Related 
sections within this resource)


http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/2009/disabilities

On this page it might be sensible to collapse the sections
- Examples of * disabilities
- Examples of web accessibility barriers
- Related sections within this resource

By collapsing those parts we have left an initially opened content which 
gives us a very informative and well readable article.


http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/2009/provisions

Again i would just collapse those further reading sections:
- Related technical specifications
- Related sections within this resource


http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/2009/browsing

On this page one can argue about collapsing or expanding the examples. 
Definitly i would collapse "Related sections within this resource".


If we keep the current form of presentation with a collapsing of nearly 
all content we should discuss the behaviour of printing. In this case I 
think it would be more appropriate to print the whole page. Or we 
provide printing links: [print visible] | [print all]


Finally a note for Shadi: unfortunatly our javascript wiz will not be 
able to help you because he will leave us and move to Berlin as he told 
me today ;(

If you want to discuss those comments feel free to contact me.

Regards, michael

-- 
Michael Stenitzer     | WIENFLUSS information.design.solutions KG
t: +43 (650) 9358770  | proschkogasse 1/5 | 1060 wien
f: +43 (1) 23680199   | www.wienfluss.net

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 21:33:31 UTC