Hi Rick,Yes, I am interested to stay in touch off-list because we have similar interests. Maybe it would be a good idea to create a mailing list that talks about financial investments from the perspective of the blind.
By the way, I have updated the menu on www.tranzactiibursiere.ro and now the top-level menus are defined as headings. From the perspective of the sighted, nothing has changed, but for us is easier to jump directly to the desired menu. I have also defined a hotkey for moving the focus to the menu, but only for the first menu (Home) because I need it often.
Octavian----- Original Message ----- From: "Ricks Place" <OFBGMail@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 3:58 PM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessible
Hi Teddy: I will look at that menu. The code MS generates is a mess indeed.Also, reding the menu control with the cursor keys is confusing and I did not even know graphics were being generated. The scroll up and down are confusing and the whole control is bad for screen reader users. That's why I put the TreeView as an option. It's cleaner but I still like your menu. I'm off to read up on it. This is allot of fun! By the way, if you are an investor we may have to get in touch off-line as that's what I'm about myself.Rick Farmington Mich. USA----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:36 AM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessibleIt is still very unclear for me.First, I don't understand what are those "scroll up" and scroll down graphics in a menu.Then I still see that all the graphics from those menus are separate instead of beeing a part of the links with the label of the menus, and if those graphics are separate, it requires 2 or 3 more down arrows to press, because if 2 links are next to each other, even if there are spaces between them, Jaws jumps directly from a link to the next one, while if there are other static texts, or graphics, Jaws doesn't do that, and it requires too many key presses.It is also very unclear which is the difference of pressing enter on those graphics, (because Jaws tells that they are clickable) and pressing enter on the corresponding links. There should be a difference, because otherwise there would be a single link, not 2 separate items.And those graphics that sy "expand menu_item" should not repeat "menu_item" because they are put right after the menu named "menu_item". They'll better be named just "SubMenu" for letting us know that the previous menu item has a submenu.Well, I might be wrong, because I am talking from the perspective of a Jaws user, and whenever Jaws reaches a right-pointing triangle in a menu item in a desktop application, it says "SubMenu", like "New submenu", "open submenu", "save submenu", and so on, and I expect something like that from a menu on the web.It would be much better if you could include those graphics in the label of the menu items that have submenus, because they would be spoken when somebody will select that link.I've taken a look to the source code of the page, but I see that .net makes a horrible code. It adds many tables for creating that menu, very long variable names for the images used, it adds CSS inline instead of using an external file which would be downloaded to the user's computer a single time, it uses horrible links like ... href="#", which disallows the user to press Shift+Enter to open a certain link from the menu in a new window if he wants that, and it uses inline Javascript events, which is also very oldish and very not recommended, because the code increases very much, and it should be also downloaded each time a visitor visits the page.That menu I recommended requires to use just a simple list of lists, and the top level list should have a certain ID and class defined, like:<ul id="udm" id="udm"> Then the rest of the list is just simple HTML.The (very many) options for setting the colors, fonts, borders, position, style of menus, effects... could be set in a .js file, then using that .js file, the programmer can create automaticly the .css file which will be used (with a program included in that menu toolkit).In order to make that menu work, it just need to add a link to the .css file and the javascript file and that's all. They would be downloaded on the visitor's computer a single time, and after that they will be taken from the cache.They would need to download only that simple list of lists.Creating a menu in .net with its automatic functions is like creating HTML automaticly with a WYSIWYG HTML editor. It doesn't create nice and clean code optimized for speed of download, but in this case isn't as usable as that menu I recommended.I don't have a very long experience installing that menu. I downloaded, tested and installed on www.tranzactiibursiere.ro only 2 or 3 days ago and it took me very little time to understand how it works. I think you should try it instead than fighting to make the .net version work better, because it might not.Octavian----- Original Message ----- From: "Ricks Place" <OFBGMail@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 2:56 PM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessibleHi back Teddy: Will Do:In the meantime I used a server.transfer so client would not have to refresh RootPage when changing from Menu to Tree Navigation and fixed the problem with the Skip Navigation hyperlink. At least these things are working with Windoweyes on the live site now.My Site: www.ricksracplace.net See if it is working better for you with JAWS.You should be able to click the Skip Navigation link and go to the Buttons to set the Navigation Mode. After clicking the TreeView button the page should refresh automatically displaying the TreeView instead of the default Menu nav control. Also, the Tree is a static tree with no expand nor collapse options so if you get them let me know. It may be that the old version is cached.Rick Farmington Mich. USA----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 6:43 AM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessibleHi Rick, Please check that menu on: http://www.tranzactiibursiere.ro/cotatii You can jump directly to the menu using the "l" key, and you will hear: List of 8 items (contains 7 nested lists)(The list has 8 items, but it contains only 7 nested lists, because the first item is a "Home" item that doesn't have submenus, so only the other 7 menus have items in them.)If you arrow down, you will hear: . Cotatii graphic SubMenuThe menu item shows just "Cotatii" and a graphic that shows that this item has submenus, and the alt attribute of it is "SubMenu" in order to make it read like Jaws reads the standard Windows menus.If you arrow down once more, you hear: List of 3 items nesting level 1This tells that the "Cotatii" menu has a submenu with 3 elements, and it also tells the nesting level, showing that these are submenus of the "Cotatii" menu. Of course, the menu items could contain other sub-menus with a higher nesting level.After this, you will hear those 3 list elements, ended by: list end nesting level 1 This tells that this menu ended, and a new menu begins.Well, my site is multilingual, and it is also based on the browser language preferences, so instead of "Cotatii", you might hear "Quotes".Octavian----- Original Message ----- From: "Ricks Place" <OFBGMail@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 1:27 PM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessibleHi Guys and dolls: Teddy, where can I check out your menu control in action?By the way, My TreeView has the Expand / collapse turned off and appears as a normal static TreeView. I'm guessing you either are getting a cached old version of the site's opening page or did not hit f5 to refresh the browser after clicking the TreeView Navigation option. By the way, my Skip Navigation hyperlink only works the first time I click it, any idea why that might be happening?Rick Farmington Mich. USA----- Original Message ----- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 4:57 AM Subject: Re: making dynamic menus accessibleHi Jenifer, Have you asked a sighted person to test those menus? I guess you didn't.Those menus are not seen as a list of lists by a sighted, but as a simple line with the top menu labels, and if a sighted person hovers the mouse over one of the menus, the menu opens just like the menus from a common Windows desktop application.So the sighted persons don't need to parse the whole list of menu items as you told.And from what you said I see that you don't know how other kind of menus work and how much html code they imply. Most of them use more Javascript and more HTML for creating the menus, so you can't say that too much html or javascript code should be downloaded on the visitor's computer if using this menu type.From this point of view, maybe the menus generated by some Javascript libraries like YUI or DOJO may require less code, because the Javascript code which should be downloaded could be also used for other things, not only for creating menus, but other kind of widgets, however unfortunately the menus created with those libs are not very friendly for the blind.So I still don't understand what kind of overloading you are talking about.Octavian----- Original Message ----- From: "Jennifer Sutton" <jsuttondc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 9:22 AM Subject: making dynamic menus accessibleHi:Since the subject is straying far away from asp menu controls, I'm changing the subject line.I'm talking about visual and mental overload with the menuing system you mentioned. All of those lists may be handy for a blind person, but they're one heckuva lot of text for someone's eyes to have to look through and/or for someone to process if reading visually is not their speediest method of access.These menus are very text-heavy, and my only point is that while blind folks may love text, not everyone does.Realizing this requires thinking outside of the blind-folks box when you're designing a Web site that requires dynamic menus. The goal should be, in my view, to strike a balance for all audiences.If you care to research this further, the topic of dynamic accessible menus has been discussed on the WebAIM list many times.Jennifer At 11:35 PM 5/4/2008, you wrote:Why "overload"?All the menus which are static, which don't use AJAX for retrieving dynamicly the elements of a certain menu after clicking on it, use much more html code than that menu.I never needed to create dynamicly generated menus by Javascript, because I always need to use the same set of menus everywhere, and if I would need something different in a certain page, it is much more simple to create another template with another menu because I don't need to create a server side program that provides data with the menu elements that should be got with an AJAX request.Octavian__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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