WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Accessible AJAX type form controls...

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 11, 2007 1:30PM

This is only partially an AT problem. We encounter pages like this in user
testing, and a more significant problem is that a blind user cannot form and
maintain a mental model of the page. They might know that a link expands or
collapses some content but they don't know how much content is being
revealed or hidden.

One technique I have seen is to expand all the nodes then use a keyword
search to find what they want. It's painfully slow if there are a lot of
nodes, and of course they don't know how many nodes there are till they get
to the last one.

I would look for an alternative way of building the page. It is difficult
enough to form a mental model of a page, and to do so when the page is
changing will be beyond some users.