Hello Aman, Several years ago, windows screen readers introduced table navigation into the windows browsing experience. Actually it was a lot of years ago now that I come to think of it.
We could use my live music trading site http://livemusic.erik-burggraaf.com as an example. If you go to that site and click the DVD link, you will get a table that has 8 columns and about 1370 rows. If you navigate this table without regard to the placement of things, you would need to navigate through over 11000 sells worth of information. I have some 30 linkin park DVD's listed up there, and at least 25 live DVD's. If you didn't like linkin park, but you really wanted to get to the live DVD's cause you were a huge fan, you'd have to read in excrusiating detail about the lp DVD's before you got to the Live dvd's. Doing an HTML search wouldn't necessarily help you because the word live appears at least 100 times on that page. It's a live music trading site after all. Thanks to table mode, you can use a system to go down just the left most column of a table, in this case, the artist column. Because I have some understanding of the value of object placement, I spanned all the rows covered by each artist, and aligned the name of the artist to the top of the spanned rows. So the artist name appears only once, and when you move down the table, you jump right over that artist's shows to the first listing of the next artist. You can then go right to the date column and look at all the shows I have listed for Live by date. I have traded with other people who built their own sites using geocities or freewebs without any tables or headings or groupings of any kind, and it's brootal man. It can take an hour to get through a list of 5 or 600 shows. I've got hundreds here that I haven't even watched, so I often get to a point very quickly where I stop looking at messy and disorganized trade sites. That's a really big example, but another one is computer store web sites. They'll have a navigation bar of about 80 links, one per catagory of computer equipment, and they don't have a nice convenient heading for you to use to skip over that. If I know that the navigation bar is on the left and the product listings are on the right, then I can Push the right arrow once in group mode and be taken to the spot where the listings start. Other wise, I'd have to go down through the listing of all 80 catagories. To be fare, I could also bring up the item chooser and type a filter to jump where I want to go, but on big sites, the item chooser can take a few seconds to load. Not an ideal situation for say, a client calls and asks for some obscure part, and you say, "let me get you a price on that real quick. Just a minute here I'm waiting for my computer..." I know this happens all the time, but the less it happens to me, the more polished and professional I feel talking dealing with my support and training clients. Best, erik burggraaf A+ certified technician and user support consultant. Phone: 888-255-5194 Email: [email protected] On 2010-02-11, at 9:58 AM, Aman Singer wrote: > Hi, CDH. > It is very good to see you here. As usual, one of your messages has > gotten me to think. You say: > Now, I use Macintosh with Safari. The Windows way of doing things > tried to emulate a word processor or some other similar text > manipulation application > with which a user would already be familiar. This is good in the sense > that the learning curve is not too steep but leaves out all of the > contextual information > a sighted user would have resulting from the juxtaposition of objects > in the page's layout. > > I agree with the fact that contextual information is usually left out > in what I might describe, after Jaws, Wineyes, and SA, as the standard > method of browsing on Windows. However, I'm a bit confused as to why > this matters. Maybe I'm missing the glaringly obvious, but why would > the contextual information interest me on most web pages? By > contextual information, I assume you mean the placement of information > on the page in relation to other aspects of the page. Maybe this is > really vital to sighted users, and maybe I'd love it if I had it, but > as it stands, I would put access to contextual information rather low > on the list of priorities. The whole point of any web page, at least > for me, is to use the information on that page, and any services the > page offers, easily and quickly. I can see certain pages where the > information is important, but for the vast majority of pages, where > things are put, what they look like, etc, doesn't fill me with > curiosity. How does contextual information, for a blind user, aid in > this? Feel free to point me to an article explaining this if there is > one. > Thanks. > Aman > > > On 2/11/10, Chris Hofstader <[email protected]> wrote: >> I'm in touch with both Willy and Mike and I'll pass on your regards. >> On Feb 11, 2010, at 9:17 AM, James & Nash wrote: >> >>> I would love to help, but I am only just getting into programming. BTW, I >>> tried to get in touch with Will Walker to pass on how sorry I was >>> regarding his job loss and to find out what the current state of Orca was >>> on Linux. This is indeed very disturbing and more than a little annoying. >>> >>> Just in case anyone else is trying to get hold of him at his Sun address, >>> it no longer exists. >>> >>> TC >>> James, Lyn, Nash & Twinny >>> On 11 Feb 2010, at 12:53, Chris Hofstader wrote: >>> >>>> With last year's lay offs at IBM and last week's lay offs at Sun, the >>>> future of large scale accessibility projects in free/open source software >>>> looks pretty disorganized at the moment. Marco (with whom I used to work >>>> at Freedom Scientific) is really dedicated but the overwhelmingly large >>>> Windows market share leads the understaffed Mozilla to pretty much focus >>>> on Windows accessibility with proprietary screen access tools like JAWS >>>> and Window-Eyes. >>>> >>>> While this is unfortunate, it does reach the majority of users so, >>>> without Apple or some other big organization to underwrite an >>>> accessibility effort, it's all up to volunteers. I would think that orca >>>> itself would require at least one full time paid staff member and we >>>> ain't got the cash for a part timer in a lower cost environment like >>>> China. >>>> >>>> Project GNU (www.gnu.org) is kicking off its first ever accessibility >>>> effort. This project has zero money and only me to look after it in my >>>> spare time. We will, of course, be focussing on GNU/Linux distros and I >>>> can't say that I know enough about Apple accessibility API to know how >>>> similar it is to what I think is iAccessible2 at the heart of Firefox >>>> access on Windows. I do not know what it uses on GNOME but I would assume >>>> it is the GNOME accessibility API. >>>> >>>> The bad economy in the US and EU is killing large scale free software >>>> efforts. We're back to mostly volunteers and scholars working randomly on >>>> their favorite issues. I'm going to try to add some order to all of this >>>> but it will be a cat herding effort and there are a lot of cats involved. >>>> >>>> cdh >>>> >>>> Happy Hacking, >>>> cdh >>>> >>>> On Feb 10, 2010, at 1:02 PM, Chris Blouch wrote: >>>> >>>>> Looking forward to trying out Firefox with VO working someday. FF has >>>>> really good ARIA support so it would be nice to have a browser on the >>>>> Mac that works well with this standard. Safari currently is weak. >>>>> >>>>> CB >>>>> >>>>> E.J. Zufelt wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> Good morning, >>>>>> >>>>>> This morning I posted a new blog article on my site: First Glance at >>>>>> Firefox Accessibility on OS X Snow Leopard, which can be accessed at >>>>>> http://tinyurl.com/ygkfqoj >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> Thanks,Everett >>>>>> >>>>>> Follow me on Twitter >>>>>> http://twitter.com/ezufelt >>>>>> >>>>>> View my LinkedIn Profile >>>>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ezufelt >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> -- >>>>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>>>>> Groups "MacVisionaries" group. >>>>>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>>>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>>>>> [email protected]. >>>>>> For more options, visit this group at >>>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>>>> Groups "MacVisionaries" group. >>>>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>>>> [email protected]. >>>>> For more options, visit this group at >>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>>> "MacVisionaries" group. >>>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>>> [email protected]. >>>> For more options, visit this group at >>>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >>> >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>> "MacVisionaries" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> For more options, visit this group at >>> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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