[WG: Accessibility] Student Project Opportunity Sakai CLE/jQuery-UI

Sat Sep 14 11:31:32 PDT 2013

Hello,

I tried this using JAWS 14 and Internet Explorer 10. I had some luck with it, although overall, it's a lot of work and intuition to figure it out. 

First, I couldn't navigate to the dragable items using my arrow keys, because if I did it that way, JAWS wouldn't really focus on it. I therefore couldn't move anything. I could tab into it (not my preferred method of navigating). When this happened, I couldn't use m, I, j and l, especially with the control key because ctrl+j opens up the view downloads option in Internet explorer, and ctrl+I opens up the favorites bar. I could avoid some screen reader keystroke conflicts when using the arrow keys as long as I pressed insert+3 to pass key through, and then used ctrl+left, right, up and down arrow keys. 

The first item in the list is a false advertisement, and JAWS does not announce that this is not moveable. When you do move something that is moveable, JAWS does tell you where it has been moved to. This whole thing would get really complex if there were ten columns, and I found it a lot to think about when there were only four. 

JAWS and IE are still the most common screen reader/browser combo used today, according to the latest WebAIM survey. I can see it's been tested with other combos, and I think that's great. But I thought this was worth mentioning since a lot of our students use this combo. I can't imagine trying to teach this method to some of our students who have very basic JAWS skills. It's hard enough for them to listen to their screen reader when they used to have sight. But then they really have to pay attention to column and row numbers before something gets moved, and then after it does. Then there's two separate keyboard functions you have to use to do it in the first place. It would be so much easier to have a link where you could just activate it, and that tool would be moved up or down, according to what the link text says.

Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:accessibility-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Matt Clare
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 2:09 PM
To: Colin Clark
Cc: <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>; <accessibility at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Subject: Re: [WG: Accessibility] Student Project Opportunity Sakai CLE/jQuery-UI

Hi Colin,

	I'm glad Joe was able to respond, as I am certainly a novice trying to broker a solution in this area and he has much more experience with ARIA & screen readers than I.

	Thanks for providing more information and checking the "not robust across modern web browsers" statement.  	It would appear I failed to isolate that issue and further oversimplified the problem in that statement.

	We knew that the specific access key assignments were a Sakai application conflict and that they were configurable in the fluid reorderer and that was not  a significant concern.  What the demo you've shared brings to light is the non-functionality in the Sakai implementation of the vertical direction keys in the Chrome & Opera browsers are a symptom of the implementation in Sakai's trunk right now -- not a problem evident in the demo you shared (and if anyone wants to debate if Opera is a modern browser or not - I concede in advance).  The demo you shared does appear not to work with horizontal direction keys FF,Chrom,Safari  & Opera, as is the case in Sakai.

	Joe shared the NVDA experience with the demo you shared.  It is quite noisy.  It is also a little less noisy in OSX VoiceOver (my evaluation tool).  Joe detailed (implementation specific) feedback on the AIRA roles in https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22621.

	To all reading, could Colin's interest in feedback and the NVDA video and JIRA description be enough information to improve the bath water and spare the baby?

	.\.\att

 ::  Matt Clare
Manager, eLearning
 Centre for Pedagogical Innovation
Part-time Instructor
 Interactive Arts and Sciences
Brock University, Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada
http://brocku.ca/pedagogical-innovation    905 688 5550 xt 4539   Office: SBH321

Running for Parkinson's Research this October http://www2.michaeljfox.org/site/TR/Sponsored/TeamFox?px=1624726&pg=personal&fr_id=1400

On 2013-09-13, at 11:39 AM, "Humbert, Joseph A" <johumber at iu.edu>
 wrote:

> Hi Colin,
> 
> How did you test NVDA with the fluid reorderer?
> 
> Here is a Jing video showing NVDA not working with fluid reorderer using both IE and Firefox:
> 
> http://screencast.com/t/NnCvfewo4W7h
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Joe
> 
> Joe Humbert, Accessibility Specialist
> UITS Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers Indiana University, 
> Indianapolis and Bloomington
> 535 W Michigan St. IT210 F
> Indianapolis, IN 46202
> Office Phone: (317) 274-4378
> johumber at iu.edu
> http://iuadapts.Indiana.edu/
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> On 2013-09-10, at 4:28 PM, Matt Clare <Matt.Clare at BrockU.CA> wrote:
> 
>> The Sakai Accessibility Working Group is proposing that https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22621 could be such a project and is offering mentoring and encouragement to any student that wants to take it on.
>> 
>> The Customize Tabs page of the Preferences Tool in Sakai has been less than ideal for a number release of the Sakai CLE.  Recently an effort has been made to revise the interface to be "draggable" but the solution currently in trunk based on the http://fluidproject.org/ is not robust across modern web browsers and the ARIA information it sends to screen reading software (JAWS, NVDA, Voiceover, etc.) is inaccurate and excessive/noisy and there are some conflicting and nonfunctional access keys .
>> 
>> A better solution could be created using jQuery.  Knowledge of the jQuery library is applicable to all modern web development, and the jQuery UI Draggable/Droppable interactions offer a solution that would address the issues identified in https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-22621 and emulate the new interface goals for the Customize Tabs page of the Preferences Tool. 
> 
> It might be worth exploring alternatives to just throwing out the baby with the bath water.
> 
> You probably know that the jQuery UI draggable widget doesn't ship with any accessibility features out of the box. It doesn't support keyboard navigation and doesn't include ARIA roles or properties.
> 
> You might not know, however, that the Fluid Reorderer provides configurable keyboard bindings. So if you're experiencing a conflict with a particular assistive technology, it's just a matter of passing a bit of extra JSON in order to support different keyboard shortcuts. The Reorderer ships out of the box with two different sets of keyboard shortcuts to minimize potential conflicts. On the JIRA ticket, Joe Humbert mentions that the ctrl+arrow keys don't work with most screen readers. How about the ctrl+i/j/k/m shortcuts that are also available by default? I just tested on the Reorderer demo here with NVDA, and it worked great:
> 
> http://fluidproject.org/releases/1.4/demos/reorderer/layoutReorderer/h
> tml/layoutReorderer.html
> 
> In terms of the noisiness of the ARIA, perhaps someone can outline what roles and states they'd prefer? Or perhaps suggest a demonstration or alternative widget that works the way they want? It's a pretty tough interaction design problem to get this right, so I'm keen to learn about interesting alternative approaches. It might make sense to make the Reorderer's ARIA information configurable via JSON as well. This should be fairly straightforward to do, and I'm happy to lend a hand or mentor a student project for this.
> 
> Can you elaborate on your comment about how it is "not robust across modern web browsers?"  We test across all the major modern browsers, but sometimes issues do slip through. If there are specific bugs you're experiencing, we're happy to fix them. Just let us know.
> 
> Colin
> 
> ---
> Colin Clark
> http://fluidproject.org
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