I have been following this with great interest.
What I have been considering (I know its been covered before) is putting a
link at the top of the page,
go to text version
Go to menu
I would think that screen reader users would find that a good addition to be
able to read an article in text only, and a shortcut to scan articles which
also have brief title tags in addition to descriptive titles.
In my design content comes first already...
Bruce Prochnau
BKDesign Solutions
----- Original Message -----
From: "Derek Featherstone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <wsg@webstandardsgroup.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 4:47 PM
Subject: Re: [WSG] Articles/reasearch/experience of screen readers
On 11/2/06, Michael Yeaney wrote:
What frustrates me most about screen reader software for the web is
the fact that the only way for them to get information from a document
is to flatten and remove ~2/3's (CSS and script) of the factors that
(possibly) are contributing to the presentation as a whole (be it
audio/visual/etc.)
I'd like to respond to this one a little bit later... on to the rest:
1) The isn't any other way to develop the software for the desktop
(you can't change the layout, there are no style sheets to remove,
etc.)
There may not be the ability to change the layout, but there are
"layout" considerations when developing desktop software. If you are
building a desktop application and drag and drop form fields (a
convenient example, I'll admit) their tab order is in the order in which
they were dragged on to the "form" or "stage" or
whatever-the-thing-is-called-in-your-situation. So, what do we do? We
make the layout more linear using the tabIndex property. The linear,
logical order is the equivalent to layout - it mimics to a certain
extent the logical visual layout that is apparent on through visual
grouping, proximity and similarity of style.
2) From a 'semantic structure' point of view (if there is such a thing
for desktop software), these type s of applications are a mess -
windows nested within windows ad nauseum (OS windows mind you).
I'm not following what you mean here (seriously!) - are you saying that
semantic structure doesn't exist in desktop applications? I'm not sure
how that applies here... Can you clarify?
3) The are specific API's designed to help convey information to
accessibility clients from the software (Microsoft's Active
Accessibility API comes to mind).
Indeed. Windows based screen readers tie directly into the MSA API.
VoiceOver on OSX ties in directly to the OSX Accessibility API, and
other *nix based screen readers are trying to do the same...
So, in a nutshell, I guess what I'm miffed about is that world of the
web has no matching counterpart, be it in script, tag attributes, or
otherwise, to help accessibility clients discover and convey
information about a site.. Seems like a very big gap, IMO.
I don't think the gap is as big as you think it might, to be honest.
Cheers,
Derek.
--
Derek Featherstone [EMAIL PROTECTED]
tel: +1 613-599-9784 1-866-932-4878 (toll-free in North America)
Web Development: http://www.furtherahead.com
Personal: http://www.boxofchocolates.ca
Web Standards: http://www.webstandards.org
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