Hi,
Just as a general question, have people (aside from Benjamin Hawkes-
Lewis) been reporting bugs they have found in or things they would
like to be fixed in the WebKit builds? See, for example, my comment
on the status of the longdesc field bug report below.
On Oct 25, 2008, at 1:16 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
Jacob Schmude wrote:
Actually will I have to disagree on these points, I'd just as soon
not have them as I always turn them off anyway. I find that I can
always identify a table by context and, further, that often the
Windows screen readers identify tables where I don't want to know--
tables used for layout for example.
Sounds like their algorithms could do with fine-tuning, but it's not
just about announcing tables; it's also about navigation of complex
data tables (e.g. reliably moving to the next row or column when
cells contain multiple lines and links) and reliably identifying
what the headers for a given cell. Of course, people differ in terms
of how much they need to interact with tables.
I like as little verbosity as possible to be honest--let me read
the information and I'll decide how to interpret it. Nevertheless
for those who do want them these options should be configurable,
but I wouldn't want them forced on me.
Yep, verbosity settings are pretty crucial here, as user preferences
differ dramatically.
One thing I would like to see is the ability to read longdescs and/
or title tags make it into the systemwide Webkit framework
Out of interest, do you have an example of the long descriptions you
want to read? I believe the WebKit developers are operating on the
belief that most longdesc attributes are junk.
Before this post I had looked up outstanding bugs with the keyword
"VoiceOver", and the original request to have this implemented is over
two years old. This is bug 10448, and the original request was:
<begin quote>
Opened: 2006-08-16 15:23 PDT
<img longdesc="xxx.htm"...> Why we don't have any browser support this
atribute? It is refered at WCAG 1.0 of W3C dated from May 5, 1999, but
7 years after we don't have browsers that support it? It is possible
put it at SAFARI?
Comment #1 From Alexey Proskuryakov 2007-07-02 06:21 PDT [reply]
Please describe what kind of support for LONGDESC you would like to
see, and why. Some implementation options could be: - adding a link to
context menu; - implementing a property inspector for end users,
similar to Firefox one; - displaying a link in addition to ALT text if
image loading is disabled; - never displaying it, but using it in
VoiceOver. Many people think that this attribute does not really help
accessibility, and it may be even removed from future versions of HTML
altogether. So, we need very specific use cases to handle this issue
with high priority.
<end quote>
I couldn't follow some of the later comments, especially since one
poster linked to site that suggested how to handle special web feature
elements that was written in Portuguese (I think).
Also, do you have an example of the title attributes you can't read?
As far as I know, the VoiceOver Help command (Control Option H) will
read a title attribute on the focused element. (In my current WebKit
build, it erroneously reads the title attribute in preference to
link text.)
Is your problem that you want the presence of the title attribute
announced, or the attribute read out automatically, or what?
> One final thing I'd like to see implemented is that it
would tell us if images and items are clickable that are not links--
in otherwords, elements with onClick and onMouseover functions.
Identifying elements with onclick and onmouseover attributes is
certainly possible. Unfortunately, this only catches a subset of
clickable and hoverable items, because better-quality code keeps
content and behavior separate by attaches event handlers through
script, not HTML attributes, and ideally attaches them to a higher
element in the tree than the one you actually click on. For example,
if you have a module containing clickable items, you might listen
for clicks on the module and, in the handler, detect if the click
was on a clickable item or not. (This is called event delegation.)
Unfortunately, the solution here appears to be better markup.
I don't think that Jacob's suggestion to identify images with onClick
and onMouseover functions is in the listed bug reports for WebKit, but
I'm not sure that I was able to use the search function accurately
enough to identify the relevant bugs. Looking back over the listings,
there are some odd fields in the bug reports. For example, there is a
"Votes" link and a "Vote for this bug" link. Are we supposed to be
voting on whether to have these bugs raised in priority to be fixed?
Also, thank you for submitting the original bug report to get VO-Shift-
M fixed in WebKit.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Cheers,
Esther
