Having just returned from a user-testing session with
someone who has severe colour perception impairment (caused by retinitis
pigmentosa) I am appalled by this "it's not the designer's problem" attitude.
This person uses the ZoomText magnifier, which has a wide range of colour
substitution features but on the site we were testing some of the colour
combinations were unreadable regardless of which filter was used. It is
essential that sites have sufficient colour and brightness contrast to begin
with.
The difficulty with AJAX and screen readers is how to
notify the user when the content has changed, how to tell them which content is
now different and how it is different. This is not covered by any standards so
it is no surprise that different screen readers behave differently as shown by a
couple of recent research articles. I do not believe that this is something the
screen reader vendors can resolve by themselves, and it will require input from
all sides of the industry to define the required behaviour.
However, it is not simply a technical problem because
any successful solution will be dependent on the user creating a mental model of
the page, modifying it each time the page is updated and keeping track of
successive updates. This is no mean feat given that even static websites can be
difficult to visualise, and I have no confidence that there will ever be a
viable solution that involves asynchronous or 'push'
technologies.
Steve
Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility
www.testpartners.co.uk
www.accessibility.co.uk
Director
Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility
www.testpartners.co.uk
www.accessibility.co.uk
From: listdad@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Laugesen
Sent: 12 June 2006 23:57
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: Re: [WSG] Screenreaders and AJAX and bears...oh my...
When I consider "accessability", I consider it reffering to accessability by computers... I know that's not how the term is usually used, but that's just how I think about it. Because, in most cases some computer system is acting as an interface between the site/software and the disabled user.
The 'old' tables and slicing method left the html virtually useless; the browsers had no idea what they're processing, they can only render it and hope the human viewing the screen can understand it.
XHTML is essentially about acheiving that... semantics... and ultimately accessability.
I think that's a reasonable responsibility to place on all developers (not just web).
However I do think it's unreasonableto expect WEB developers to implement generic solutions to accessability problems, ie, why implement your own screen reader? Or provide facility to change font size? IMO even considering colour blindness is counter-productive, colour correction should be a feature of an 'acccessability-friendly' browser.
I'm not much up-to-speed with screen readers; anyone care to educate us? What's hot, what's not, etc?
Any WSG members use screen readers? (due to dissability I mean, not just for testing).
J
On 13/06/06, Gene
Falck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hi Mike,
You wrote:
>However, what I've noticed that you do not see are articles pushing
>the screen reader manufacturers to make more capable and intellegent
>readers for the browsers.....they seem to be able to do this for
>desktop applications (at least to a reasonable level). It seems that
>many of the efforts we are making (as well as the WSG) to enable
>accessibility are in fact disabling (and in many cases abandoning) the
>rich features on the net - this goes back to the whole "magazine
>article" site versus the "application" site - two different purposes,
>two different needs - both based on the same underlying technologies,
>and both need to be accessible.
IMO this is because physical access rules came after there were
wheelchairs that had, in turn, been developed long after most of
the physical structures we take for granted were standardized.
In spite of that timeline, there were some things that had to be
changed such as the provision of ramps.
In web development, we are, then, figuratively, trying to build
doorways and invent the wheelchair at much the same time. Not
only is there a major emphasis on web sites doing a lot of the
work on this but also our efforts may be obsolete as soon as the
next generation of assisting software is introduced.
That may be a discouraging prospect, but I think we still have
to keep up as best as we can.
--
Regards,
Gene Falck
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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