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. ... 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. dp: the effect of this can and is being reduced by stating in text what one will find. I often see this now on sites where they say go to your account where you can... so one link taking you to an index with an explanation of what is contained therein does not or does not have to deminish its effectiveness. people can then decide whether to click through. I've seen a lot of people click through nav links only to click back realizing they went to the rong place. I do believe there are other approaches but it really is not necessary and is downright intrusive to the experience to clutter every page with sight nav. I want to read the story. I want to check out, I want to interact with my shopping cart etc. I don't want to have to hunt all over every page to do it. 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. dp: see above. 3) On complex sites, you can use well-designed navigation to tell users where they are in relation to the rest of the site: dp: this assumes sites need to be complex in the first place which they do not. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html dp: requires a lot of reading to understand. May be good visually but is not necessary to achieve the purpose and drowns the auditory and braille user in a ton of > signs. 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: dp: unless they are just starting out. 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. dp: and then there are the sites that allow you to do it with a click. When we do our accessibility policy/standards development, it is user centered and one of the things we ask when we look at a speck and the role that adding a requirement would play is what would drive users to sites developped with it and how would that be achieved. We get a lot of pushback from the industry on this but we are steadily gaining ground. ... 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. dp: now you are getting into browser and assistive technology design and I maintain that good web design negates the need for this but the industry mainly microsoft have forced us into a box. We need to break out of that box and I hope that's what the next itterations of the speck do and we are working with the working groups designing them to achieve that. Like I said before, an approximation of this jumping is already possible with JAWS and Window-Eyes. dp: and voice over. ... >From what, exactly? dp: or to avoid doing the thinking up front. People need to be made to think. Most don't want or need to be played down to. I won't visit a site that makes me feel dumb. ... 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. dp: this seems to me to point out the opposite. They don't think before clicking because they know what ok will do not because they don't want to think. If however, we did things better, we would provide the user with viable alternatives. 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. dp: Yes, security is an interesting an many prongged challenge but falls not directly inside the sphere of web design which as I have stated should be good for all and right now, it seems only good for some because they believe it should be so and are unwilling to change. Regards -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
