This style of auto-running carousel seems like a poor choice accessibility-wise. Unfortunately I don't have a paper to quote here..
People using assistive technology/ a keyboard only need enough time to select the invitation links. The screen changes could be disorienting to screen reader users. While "ARIA live region" markup could help people be aware of changes, the associated stream of announcements would be really annoying. Janna -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Petteri Hiisila Sent: September 13, 2009 9:49 PM To: IXDA list Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Are carousels effective? Hi Elizabeth, Here's some thoughts. Carousels like the one in Amnesty Australia (http:// www.amnesty.org.au/) are good for displaying site highlights, main stories, new products and generally getting attention and clicks to some particular pages that you think people would like to visit. It's great when you want to cherry-pick material and give your good stuff a lot of screen estate. However, it's slow and frustrating for site navigation - and using tabs and arrows only makes it worse. I wouldn't use it as a navigation design pattern. Think about it this way: clicking the carousel isn't a goal. Getting into the content is. Carousels that hide content is bad for navigation, because the user will have to click through everything to see what's available. Carousels that display a centered item plus some side items is a little better, but the users would still have to 1) click to focus to the content and 2) open it. Step 1 is unnecessary excise work. So, I wouldn't put tabs on top of a carousel, but I would consider having a separate carousel on top of each main section of the site, if the sections contains material that need highlighting. Just keep the user interaction _inside_ the carousel element simple. Amnesty's 1-2-3-4 approach works. For visual navigation: Grid is a good option if you want to do visual navigation, because one click is enough to get to the content. Grid plus tabs would also work, if the groupings make sense and the tabs have meaningful labels. Grid plus arrows also work, but you have to display clearly how many screens or pages of content there is. The drawback is that grid'ed items can't be as big, but I don't know a design pattern that would combine the visual appeal of a carousel and the snappiness of a grid. iTunes 9 Store has a pretty good implementation of carousels and tabbed navigation. Carousels are used to highlight popular and featured material, and tabbed drop-downs give access to all of what's available. That, and a good search, will work great most of the time. Consider soft transitions between carousel changes, such that it doesn't steal attention when the user is trying to concentrate on another part of the page. (Sorry, I don't have any usability reports to share :) Best, Petteri -- Petteri Hiisilä Senior Interaction Designer, owner / iXDesign Mobile: 650-450-6014 (USA), +358505050123 (FIN) Twitter: http://twitter.com/petterihiisila LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petterihiisila ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
