Comments for Web Access Centre Blog

Comment on CAPTCHA - if your name’s not down you’re not coming in. by Movies Clips

Movies Clips — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:47:39 +0000

Hi,Thanks for the informative post Henny. These things are a real nuisance and crop up everywhere, though I suspect you may be right in that there is no easy solution. I came across an example of a website which uses a trivia question to weed out spammers.

Comment on WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the web by Henny

Henny — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:16:13 +0000

Hi Adrian,
I appreciate your concerns and have also followed comments about WebAnywhere on BCAB. I agree that the devlopment of screen reader tools certainly does seem to have been growing a fair amount recently creating wider choice and with it the possiblity of confusion. I do think there are many positive aspects to having such choice however as long as there is enough information out there that correctly describes all of these products. As you so rightly point out .
In many cases I’m sure the questions “Which product shall I use” will be answered by what environment you are working in. While a screen reader on a USB or CD such as NVDA may be the right solution for a user with no PC of their own it wont necessarily be for people in developing countries where access to even this basic form of storage is not readily available. A solution such as WebAnywhere could fill that gap. On a personal note I feel that we have a responsibility to help facilitate people accessing the web in developing countries and this hardware / software free solution seems highly attractive, especially with the one laptop per child initiative.
Like you say the market is becoming increasingly swamped but again this may lead to future collaboration rather than dilution as vendors team up, many of the newer screen readers on offer are still in their infancy after all. Overall I think your point about ensuring that there is clear understanding on what each solution offers is key. Wikipedia a page listing screen readers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screen_readers which would be great to expand. It is also a piece of work that organisations such as RNIB, AbilityNet, Becta and others could also work together on.

Comment on WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the web by Adrian Higginbotham

Adrian Higginbotham — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:12:35 +0000

always good to see new free to use tools and open source activity that adds to the knowledge of the overall community but this side of the market seems to be growing rapidly of late and I fear we’re in danger of giving those who stand to benefit most, the individual new to the technology, too much choice and too little information about which products are appropriate. Which free product shall I use? NVDA the open source screenreader that requires no installation (and can be run from a a USB drive or CD), System Access to go, (recently made freely available to anyone via the accessibility is a right (air) foundation), Thunder (which has been free to individuals for some time) but which has recently been made free to organisations too. or maybe I only need a website screenreader such as the one mentioned here, or Firevox, the free plug-in for the Firefox browser that serves much the same function. and as they are the ones I can think of from the top of my head it seems likely there are others. Anything that means we don’t need to pay $1000 or £500+ for access to a computer is of course welcomed but too much choice and too few unique selling points might just lead to confused users vulnerable to salesmen (and women too) and nothing chaging. It would be nice to see a bit more collaboration between freeware and open source projects leading to fewer but more comprehensive and capable tools rather than all this duplication of effert.

Comment on Accessibility 2.0 - Conference by joanne finch

joanne finch — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:07:05 +0000

I’ll be there too!
Might be a bit tired after having to get up at 5.30am to get there on time.

Comment on Accessibility 2.0 - Conference by patrick h. lauke

patrick h. lauke — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:29:56 +0000

I’ll be there, though my train comes in late so I’ll probably miss the first session.

Comment on Too much accessibility - TITLE attributes by Bim

Bim — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:27:07 +0000

Hi Peter, I’m not sure that I understand how a potentially
confusing repetition can be better than clear static link text. The
user can easily get the link read again, if they aren’t sure where it
leads. But the convergence of a link, for instance to, “About us”,
with an identical TITLE attribute is likely to be announced
as, “About usabout us”. The only way to avoid this is to include
punctuation and spaces in the TITLE, such as “About us. “.
Punctuation in “tooltip” text is so rare, that there’s a greater
likelihood of increasing, rather than reducing confusion.

Where TITLE attributes may be useful, is in providing a call to
action, or expansion of the link text. For instance a link to “Sport”
is self-explanatory, but can mean different things depending on the
sporting season, or the content being provided on the site. Here
the TITLE “attribute could be useful, identifying the sports being
covered. Then it would be explaining the “Sport” link, without
confusion or repetition, although the link text, “Sport”, is accurate
in itself. So there are winners, but no losers.

I do take your point on the width of text in our Blog though, and
thank you for raising it. We’ve started working on a way to get this
under control, and hope to have it changed in the near future.

Comment on CAPTCHA - if your name’s not down you’re not coming in. by imam hossain

imam hossain — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:10:18 +0000

need captcha data entry work

Comment on Too much accessibility - TITLE attributes by Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:02:35 +0000

Hello Folks,
I’m not convinced by this article at all, I’m sorry. For me accessibility
is about balancing functionality with practicality. For someone using
a screen reader with disabled hands and suffering from short-term
memory loss, repitition is vital!

Often there is a delay in deciding whether or not to follow that link,
so those few seconds whilst the “confirmation” of where the link
leads becomes vital!

There is one really peeving thing about _this_ page! Good readability
is limiting lines of text to around 12 to 15 per line. That provides the
ability to speed-read (with assimilation) and does not hurt the eyes
of people with reasonable vision have it badly hampered by trying
to follow long lines of text right across the screen.
…and No! resizing the browser window is _not_ an option.

Both the article and this page layout demonstrate excuses for not
putting enough thought into the design process. Expending a bit of
thought into how title texts are composed is by far better than just
leaving them out.

Comment on Hidden barriers - out of sight by Bim

Bim — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:28:24 +0000

You’re absolutely right, “display: none” does prevent most screen reader from announcing hidden content .

You aren’t quite right in thinking that this is only used for image replacement though. It’s also used to display and collapse menus where, if screen readers ignored the “display: none” command, their users would have the dubious treat of having to read every second and third level link on a page, even though they aren’t visible. It’s also used for showing and hiding FAQ answers on some pages, and because that technique is used, rather than in-page links, the creen reader would need to read through all unwanted answers until they reach the one they want.

Comment on Is your site half-naked? by Bim

Bim — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:59:29 +0000

Hi Aazim,

It’s possible that you have your browser settings for colour set to override the web site designed colours, or to ignore CSS colours defined by the web site. Which browser are you using?

If you can let us know, we may be able to tell you how to fix it.