I've responded below marking my inserts with dp: I've left only those portions in to which I have responded.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by theblind" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2008 5:55 AM Subject: Re: Designing web pages for screen readers Designs, good and bad, have shaped current user expectations, along with publisher habits and user expectations inherited from previous media and computer information systems. dp: what previous media? till rather recently, I've never seen a print book, magazine, newspaper or other construct video or audio which forces me to do things like a lot of current design does. In fact, if design were truly bassed on past experience and design, it might actually be better. When the web was first being designed, it did just that; designing on good previous models with the new concepts of true hypertext added which seems now to be a factor overlooked in the rush to design the most glitzy and top heavy bloat possible since they use hi res screens and high bandwidth to base their designs around. To go back and change a design used throughout the web would be monumentally difficult and expensive. But it is a linear, technical job. Changing a design for one website is roughly the same as changing a design for the next. dp: That may be, but if a user starts seeing sites built along good structural and style lines, they will first expect that site when they revisit it to remain the same just as it does now and be looking for sites that mirror this ease of use. ... In cruder terms, making a change that goes against user expectations has the potential to cost a lot of business. dp: and it also has the potential to increase traffic more rappidly following that. Many organizations provide sneak peaks at the designs they are working on but I haven't seen any of them deviate from their plans preformed before the sneak peaks based on user feedback. I though have seen lots of users given a choice not use the newer glitser sites. That certainly doesn't mean changing designs is never worth doing, but don't underestimate the difficulty of changing people used to, and other systems based around, current practice. > I agree about small biew ports so there is no harm in putting a link at > the > highest point of regard that points to an index. I like the index removed > from pages altogether. We're veering off the initial topic of where best to put the navigation, but I think that's an interesting preference. I think keeping navigational clutter to a minimum is good. However, I also think that it's non-viable preposition both commercially and in terms of general usability to reduce navigation to a single link to an index. Here's just three reasons: 1) Iif you've got a small amount of navigation (let's say Blog, Photos, About Me), then all you do by removing that to another page is replace three links of navigation with one link, and force users to click twice to get to the same content. The more minimal your navigation, the more the returns diminish of moving it to another page. 2) If you have some navigation in the page, you can give users a hint of what other exciting stuff is on your site. If you don't give them such a hint, a lot of them wouldn't bother to look in the index. 3) On complex sites, you can use well-designed navigation to tell users where they are in relation to the rest of the site: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html Assuming you don't drown content with navigation, it imposes no cognitive load on sighted users because they've learnt to simply ignore it until they need it: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000109.html I'm a bit sceptical that removing navigation would improve people's web experience. But if you have knowledge of CSS selectors and the display and speak properties, you can set up user styles for some of your favorite sites and try it out for yourself. All browsers have some sort of facility for doing this, although the user interface is non-obvious and will usually require you to learn some new skills. In other words, it's guaranteed to make the user think. ;) Safari's and Internet Explorer's implementations makes this a little difficult, often forcing you to rely on so-called "CSS signatures" that not all sites provide, but OmniWeb allows site-by-site user stylesheets and the Stylish add-on for Firefox allows customization by URL. Firefox's GreaseMonkey add-on can even alter sites on the fly, which can be more effective than styling tweaks in some cases. Here's some relevant resources to get you started, if you're interested: Basic CSS tutorial: http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss CSS selectors: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/ Display property: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#propdef-display Speak property: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/aural.html#propdef-speak CSS signatures: http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/13291 Loads of examples of user styles: http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/ If the next versions of HTML and XHTML includes elements for indicating navigation areas, it would make it much easier to simply remove or hide them. But I suspect that would be a lot less useful than being able to: * Jump to the next navigation area with a key-combination. * Read all navigation areas in a page with key-combination. * Jump to the next content area with a key-combination. * Read all content areas in a page with a key-combination. Like I said before, an approximation of this jumping is already possible with JAWS and Window-Eyes. > Don't make me think is a cop out. From what, exactly? > It is also circular. It's hard to not make you think and the harder > I try, the more you think. Any human effort may have the opposite of the intended effect. That doesn't mean that all human aims are circular. If it's possible to make users think harder (and you say it is), then it's necessarily also possible to allow them to think less than that. If it's possible to allow them to think less, then the goal of not making them think has been achieved. So your criticism of the idea doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps a good example of how (I think) you're underestimating both the power of users' habit and their intolerance of being forced to think is the widespread failure of the warning dialogues about incorrect certificates that web browsers pop up to protect users from phishing sites. The Windows environment regularly pops up confirmation dialogs to ask users if they really want to do whatever they just told the system to do ("Do you really want to delete myphoto.jpg?" and so on). This has trained a lot of users to just click OK. So when they see a warning dialog about incorrect certificates, they just click OK without even reading the message. Of course, reading the message would require the user to think in order to extract the essential idea from a load of technobabble about certificates. I don't think the unwillingness to learn this stuff makes users stupid: I think it reflects the fact that they are mostly time-poor, non-technical folk trying to get on with a task, and their stupid computer is getting in the way. Making security systems successful will involve making them intelligent enough to take more of the cognitive load off overworked, stressed-out human users. Regards -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
