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Re: accessible rotating image scripts?

for

From: Al Sparber
Date: Jan 23, 2010 10:48AM


Calm down. I'm not attacking you. I'm trying to speak past you to people
like Geof. There have been far too many debates on this list - and I've done
my share of that in the past - but I'm just trying to make a small,
unobtrusive, low-bandwidth logical case for common sense. It has nothing to
do with you, your books, your gigs, or my products. Different developers
take different approaches in different sets of circumstances. Just like
everything out in the wild with the PVII name on it isn't perfect, the same
can be said for things with the Heilmann or Yahoo label. We live in an
imperfect world, work in a very imperfect business, and try to do the best
we can as we move forward.

The point is simple. The solution can and should be simple. That's it. If
you leave it to web standards theorists and practitioners to come up with
programmed or specification-based solutions, on their own, the result will
always be complex. It must be complex and it will continue to be complex
unless the assistive technology makers join the discussion in places like
this list. I want to hear their reasoning.

I have attempted to talk to the Jaws people about making a greater effort to
dialog with the standards people about simple solutions, but they always
seem to turn a deaf ear.

--
Al Sparber

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From: "Christian Heilmann" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >

> Al Sparber wrote:
>> That's even worse :-)
>>
>> I'm not going to convince you of anything and that's certainly not my
>> goal.
>> And I certainly am not so presumptuous as to think that in this industry
>> anything is "THE ANSWER". But my humble sense of logic tells me (and
>> perhaps
>> only me) that if I were blind and wanted to propose the ideal "carousel"
>> here is how I would tell the designer to do it:
>>
>> 1. Make it so that all the links and controls that sighted people see are
>> invisible to my screen reader.
>> 2. Simply make it so that my screen reader reads the content linearly and
>> naturally as if the sliding panels were, to a sighted person, ordinary
>> blocks of content displayed on the page.
>>
>>
>> That's it.
>>
>> Of course, the screen reader makers and the standards makers have to be
>> on
>> the same page and share the same logic. Sadly, though, our industry
>> leaders
>> don't often allow their logic to be simple as it takes away the fun of
>> developing and promoting more complex and technology-laden solutions -
>> the
>> kind that lead to book deals and speaking gigs :-)
>>
>>
> If that was a personal attack then you have never seen any of my
> presentations or read one of my books.
>
> On the subject matter, however, I just published an article on
> smashingmagazine on how to test JavaScript solutions for basic
> usability, accessibility and maintenance issues:
> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/21/find-the-right-javascript-solution-with-a-7-step-test/
>
> When you look around you you will find that far too many solutions are
> built not even caring about sensible markup - accessibility is really
> low on the radar as a shiny image rotator is easier to sell than to make
> people care about universal access.