[macvoiceover] Re: A discussion on navigation, content and web pages

Rich, this is an excellent point, and one which I think a lot of blind / VI peeps forget or don't know. When a sighted person views a webpage, they still need to not only read / skim through it to locate what they want, but also once they find it, they need to scroll through it to read it if it spans more than one page at a time, so when VI people have options to read text from the cursor to the end of the document and such, it's actually easier for them, as they don't need to manually scroll to finish what they're reading. For someone seeing the page, reading it can actually be a very 'active' process, as it can also be with a visually impaired person. It's just that the types of activities needed, to manage the page for each person may be a bit different. 

Smiles,

Cara  :)


On Feb 22, 2008, at 1:10 PM, Rich Caloggero wrote:
the visual reader is still faced with sifting through navigation to get to content.
Interesting that you say that. I guess I have the mistaken idea that web pages generally work well for sighted people. I guess "working well" needs to be more precisely defined. I.E., working well for whom: the advertizers who want their ads noticed, or site owners who want their site (navigation) to be noticed more than the content within (especially if its produced elsewhere).
I think the most adaptive solution would be to have the ability to serve pages automatically tailored to your accessibility preferences on the fly. If your prefs indicate your a screen reader user, then give me straight xhtml, no ajax. If your a magnification user, provide large nav items, rsizable everything, and maybe single column text so no horizontal scrolling needed. If you suitably indicate via your prefs, or by the absence of said prefs, you'll get served the default (possibly glitsy flashy ajax-based) website.
If your original source files are xml, then suitable xslt can do this kind of transformation on the fly. The advantage is that you need only maintain one set of source files, and can serve multiple versions on demand. You could even build this all into a content management system, which could store all kinds of user preference info. When you log in, it could recall your preference info, and then serve content to you based on those prefs. 


-- rich

----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg Kearney" <gkearney@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 3:24 PM
Subject: [macvoiceover] Re: A discussion on navigation, content and web pages
While what you suggest will work for screen reader user the visual reader is still faced with sifting through navigation to get to content. How did we ever get to a state where navigation became the dominate visual item on the page and not the content? 

Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
gkearney@xxxxxxxxx

On Feb 22, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Rich Caloggero wrote:


Two other possibilities for dealing with navigation are as follows.
1. Design pages which use html heading markup to clearly denote sections/subsections. Imagine we have two divs: content and navigation. By convention we can always place an h1 tag as the first child of the content div. This shall, by convention, always contain a page title (text or graphic), and by convention should be the only h1 on the page. If subsections are needed, either within nav or content, start with h2. This would then serve to delimit the nav section from the content, and a screen reader capable of navigating by heading could then allow the use to skip over the nav section with one keystroke. Note that voiceOver does allow heading navigation in Leopard, but not in Tiger. The other thing to note is that while heading navigation is possible, it could be made more effective if commands for moving to headings of a given level were added. For instance, vo +command+1 to move to the next heading level 1, etc. Now, in our example above, we could move to the beginning of the content by doing vo+command+1 (move to first h1).
2. I feel the above solution is the best, since it requires little work, and forces the developer to think about semantics, separation of structure from presentation, and good information design. However, one could also use CSS to force the nav to appear after the content. This would then allow the screen reader user to find the start of the content by going to the top of the page. You could provide a skip link to skip to the start of the navigation. 


Just my two cents.
-- Rich
----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg Kearney" <gkearney@xxxxxxxxx > To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by the blind" <discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "macvoiceover" <macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>; "Andrew Furlong" <Andrew.Furlong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Iain
Murray" <i.murray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <elise@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > 
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 1:31 PM
Subject: [macvoiceover] A discussion on navigation, content and web pages
I have a done a short segment on the topic of navigation, content and web pages which can be found at: http://cucat.org/projects/navigation/ 

Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
gkearney@xxxxxxxxx



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