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

[Matt Clare]

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/html/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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