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WAI-ARIA, mouseover pop-ups, and audio content

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From: deblist@suberic.net
Date: Feb 6, 2010 3:12PM

For a grant funded project, we are building a page of hyperlinked
oral histories with transcripts. The oral histories (presented
via SMIL objects) are actually relatively accessible themselves,
because they have simultaneous audio and transcript, so the
content is available both to those who cannot see the transcript
and those who cannot hear the audio.

... Actually, I haven't tried the current implementation in
screen readers yet, so I don't know what screen readers do when
confronted with an audio player that scrolls text. That might be
problematic; I will need to look into it.

However, part of the rich functionality of this particular set of
oral histories is hyperlinks in the transcripts which provide
links out to more information about the hyperlinked concepts and
people. If screenreader users *don't* use the transcript, because
they are using oral history instead, they will never know about
the hyperlinks.

Also, the developers want to have actions which happen on mouse
over of the hyperlinks. I know how to explain to them about how
to make the mouseover functionality keyboard accessible for
non-mouse and speech to text users, but I have no idea what the
desired behavior should be for screenreader users. If a
screenreader user activates one of the hyperlinks while the audio
is playing, I can't imagine a WAI-ARIA alert would be beneficial.

What would be the most accessible UI? Some of these oral
histories are a couple of hours long. They don't have chapters,
although they do have very short time bubbles, usually 30 to 90
seconds each, although I don't know we to tell the application to
pause after each time bubble and list hyperlinks ONLY for screen
reader users. (Which to me seems like the ideal UI.)

Thank you,

-deborah