Comments on: Accessibility

By: Tad

Tad — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:55:23 +0000

I was a bit confused about the asking of my age, on the Shockwave plug-in– and even more confused that I couldn’t figure out how to install it for Firefox, but only for IE.

As for the new windows/tabs issue, I think the real solution is to not make the page mandate that, but to hope that page visitors know how to work their preferences on their browsers. You can always set the browser to automatically open links in new tabs, or left-click and open in a new tab when you don’t know if you wanna lose the data on the page before you.

It does bring up an interesting point, though– something that hadn’t occurred to me, even as a fairly new convert to Firefox: tabbed browsing is a whole new paradigm. It’s changed the way I surf the net. You expect to be able to control what info stays up and current and what you navigate away from. It’s surprising to me that I made the transition without contemplating what a radical shift it really is.

By: Jennifer Levasseur

Jennifer Levasseur — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:16:33 +0000

As I said in my blog, the only way I had a snowball’s chance in you know where of figuring the whole simulation out was to visualize what I know most school web sites look like. Most are fairly basic with a navigation bar somewhere near the top, a picture or two, and then some other text. But it really required me to use my prior VISUAL knowledge…otherwise, I’d have been melting…

By: maureen guignon

maureen guignon — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:47:40 +0000

I am glad someone else had trouble with the Screen Reader Simulation but as you and Misha note it did put accessibility into better context.

And, I did not think of looking at the date for the articles which I should do as it brings up the important question you raise of what has changed for the better, or worse, since then.

By: Misha Griffith

Misha Griffith — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:44:21 +0000

I, like you, found the Screen reader daunting. Probably less so than say, crossing the street if I were blind. So you just do it! I came to realize how little information is conveyed in the brief labels we put in the navigation bar. Those one word labels really don’t say enough! I guess we could do the same as with the alternative for the image–design a longer description to appear (be read aloud) when the cursor hovers over the button. Listening to the voice say “linkhomelinksitemaplinketc.” very quickly is not very helpful.