Comments on: Accessibility: Take 2

By: Claude Almansi

Claude Almansi — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:20:37 +0000

Both http://www.cssquirrel.com/comic/?comic=35 and http://www.cssquirrel.com/comicscripts/script35.htm are great. And this could be such an incentive in language (whether native or secondary) classes: asking students to produce verbal descriptions of comics that work would get more echo if they knew it could be of real use to people who can’t view the comics.

By: Chaals

Chaals — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:05:19 +0000

PS Thanks for the comic in general…

By: Chaals

Chaals — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:04:26 +0000

Well, I had a chat with My Good Friend John (a.k.a. $%%(&*^%&$ Foliot, inter alia) between the adding of aria-describedBy and the subsequent addition of longdesc. There’s probably a chain in there somewhere (not to mention whips and oil and whatever else keeps John’s bike running).

Thank you for your efforts in working on accessibility for this. Thanks in particular for the longdesc thing, since there really is a shortage of people who post stuff the HTML 5 public reads who actually use longdesc.

It’s true that the aria version requires the content to be on the screen – longdesc merely *allows* that. But then, it is in theory possible to change that since ARIA is in working draft. The argument against is that ARIA is currently meant to work on a page or application, but I don’t think it’s such a hassle even in a widget installed and running offline, since it can hold the descriptive content offline too. In certain situations it may even make sense to be able to collect the descriptions in a seperate document (rather like a glossary) for ease of maintenance.

The argument Lachlan gives against allowing this is that it leads to invisible metadata, which in the general case is often badly-maintained. However, these things are, in the general case, non-existent, so looking at what people (and squirrels) who actually use these things do might be more important than extrapolating from the skewed dataset of “everything in existence”.

Anyway, since I am in the process of looking carefully at how to do our ARIA support in Opera, and therefore looking once again carefully at the spec (after several years of not getting close to most of the nitty-gritty), your experience and thoughts, and those of your readers, are interesting and valuable.

I have some other thoughts (and talked to John about them), but it is very late. Assuming I managed to solve the semantic puzzle, I will try to get back to the topic later…

By: Henri Sivonen

Henri Sivonen — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 07:17:29 +0000

I didn’t intend to draw a comparison with the Super Frinds. I was just lazy and assumed you were reading the #whatwg logs in search for material for the comic anyway.

By: Terrill Thompson

Terrill Thompson — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 03:27:20 +0000

The short answer: Yes. The Longdesc on your comic does the job in both JAWS 10 and Window-Eyes 7 (nicely written description by the way!)

The long answer is here: http://tinyurl.com/blogdesc

By: Gonzalo González Mora

Gonzalo González Mora — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:43:58 +0000

I'm sorry for the double comment but I found something quite interesting: a set of ARIA Test Cases where there's an entry on JAWS for aria-describedby but for the indentation I don't know if that is the expected behavior, or the current one: JAWS: If described by is used on a fieldset (group box), JAWS speaks the description when focus is placed on a control within the group box for the first time. If described by is used on a control, JAWS displays the description when the user presses JAWSKey+F1.

By: Gonzalo González Mora

Gonzalo González Mora — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:32:35 +0000

I did a (very) quick search on Google for aria-describedby and found three entries: one said that the key for it is F1, other said “JawsKey+F1″ (I don’t know what that means) and the other one said it’s Insert+F1. I don’t have JAWS so I can’t test it, unfortunately.

I think I should read more on this, I have two books which I got recently but I couldn’t find the time to read them, I’ll try to read one this weekend. One is “Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance” by J. Thatcher, M. Burks, et al., and the other one is “Maximum Accessibility” by John Slatin and Sharron Rush.

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:10:10 +0000

@Terrill – I’m not sure how widely supported aria-describedby is, but I figure someday readers will use it, hence the inclusion. Thank you very much for the feedback. Does the longdesc attribute properly send you to the transcript?

By: Terrill Thompson

Terrill Thompson — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:03:16 +0000

I’ve not had any luck getting aria-describedby to work, either on your comic or on other test sites. I’ve come to believe it’s not yet supported either by browsers or screen readers (not sure which, maybe both), but I’m standing by to be corrected on that. I’ve tried JAWS 10, WindowEyes 7.0 and NVDA 0.6p3.2 using IE 8 and Firefox 3.5. None of them announce the describedby text or its availability in any way.

Longdesc is working though. I don’t think NVDA supports it yet, but JAWS and Window-Eyes both announce the availability of a long description and invite the user to read it by pressing another keystroke (Enter in JAWS, Alt+Enter in Window-Eyes).

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:22:57 +0000

Stéphane – The primary objective is to provide lasting support for vision-impaired readers to have easy access to the transcript of a comic, without bloating the comic’s page with a large hidden field filled with the descriptions and transcript. I’ve been using both attributes in an attempt to allow support for older and newer screen-readers (it’s my understanding that longdesc is in the process of being put out to pasture, so I didn’t want to rely on it alone.)

I’m not certain if the aria-describedby solution I have works properly or not (aka, if it provides a clear path to the link that brings up the transcript), hence the feedback requests. If not, I’ll need to tinker with it more.

Gonzalo – Definitely still related to the topic. In the past I’ve been instructed that you should always start link alt attributes with “Link to”… but I don’t recall if it was advice meant for some strange SEO practice at the time, or accessibility or what. Any screen-reader users able to offer feedback? Is it obnoxious, or helpful?