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Re: css off

for

From: Despain, Dallas
Date: Aug 25, 2009 10:00PM

Chris,

Thank you for your very well thought out response.

I agree that section 508 does not apply to web 2.0 technologies very well and agree with the technicality that this fact still doesn't get us off the hook. Really, we won't be off the hook until section 508 gets updated because we have government clients, so we want to comply with it first.

To your next point, I agree, it is reasonable to ask that dialogs be included in the document in an order that makes sense. The problem I have when CSS is off is that the dialog trigger(the link or button that launches the dialog) is present and then the dialog content is present directly below.

For Example, say a "log in" link launches a dialog containing two text input fields, "username" and "password" and two buttons, the submit button labeled "log in" and a "cancel" button. The document order goes "Log In link" "Username edit" "Password edit" "Login button" "cancel button". When you read this with css off it's confusing. Why is there a link that says "login" and a button that also says "login"? What's the "cancel" button even for? There's no change in context which always accompanies a dialog.

Incidentally, I ditched the ARIA plugin for dialogs, so perhaps I linked to a bad example for my purposes here. We did some accessibility usability testing, and none of our 5 participants used JAWS 10 and the aria techniques used don't work for ie8 and JAWS, so I have been enhancing them with more traditional methods like managing focus well and using off-screen text to announce the change in context.

We've had to concede to making javascript required though. :(

I'm willing to give up all my css except display:none - that seems reasonable to me :)

Thanks,

Dallas