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

[Colin Clark]

Hi Mary,

Thanks for your testing! 

You're right that some of our keyboard shortcuts do conflict with Internet Explorer 10's default shortcuts. I've filled a bug about that and we'll aim to do some research into others alternatives that we can include out of the box in the Reorderer and ensure that we're correctly capturing keyboard events.

You mentioned that the "locked advertisement item" in the demo, which isn't movable, isn't announced as such in JAWS. I tested it with both JAWS 14 and NVDA and they both read it as "Fixed," whereas the movable items were read as "movable, draggable." So that seems to be working.

You're right, though, that there is a lot of extra chatter when you move something with the Layout Reorderer, and I think we can improve that. Right now, the aria-label on each of the movable items tells you the location of the item in a list of columns. This is intended to allow a user who is exploring the page to hear where each item is in the layout. In addition, when item gets moved around we write out a message to a live regions that describes where the item was moved to. As a result, this causes the position to be read out twice--first as result of the live region, and then as part of the label. I think we can simplify the labelling in the Reorderer so that it is less verbose when something has been moved.

Your point about how many users work with JAWS and Internet Explorer is a good one. It's a tough issue to balance: innovation vs. supporting legacy browsers. I was just talking with Rich Schwerdtfeger, one of the leads on WAI-ARIA, who was telling me how badly Internet Explorer's ARIA compliance is lagging behind their competitors. Apparently a large number of enterprise customers and the US Department of Education are contemplating dropping Internet Explorer because it doesn't provide sufficient accessibility for modern web application idioms. I know how long it takes people to learn and adjust to new browsers and tools, so it's a tough issue all around. We try to do our best at supporting all browsers and assistive technologies, but it takes a lot of help from testers like you.

Most importantly, I'd love to hear you describe your thoughts on alternative user interfaces. It sounds like you've got a few ideas. This kind of user interface can be quite challenging to make inclusive, since it involves explicitly spatial concepts (a grid of items organized in rows and columns). The two-dimensional versions of the Reorderer tend to be easier to parse, since they only ever involve one column.

Can you be more specific about the kind of interaction you'd prefer to see? Are there other widgets or controls like this that you've used elsewhere that work particularly nicely in your mind?

Thanks so much for your help!

Colin

On 2013-09-14, at 2:31 PM, "Stores, Mary A." <mstores at indiana.edu> wrote:

> 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.

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Colin Clark
http://fluidproject.org