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

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From: ckrugman@sbcglobal.net
Date: Feb 6, 2010 10:39PM

Sometimes audio on web sites presents problems for screen reader users as
the screen reader cannot always be heard over the site audio. As a screen
reader user I like to be able to disable the site audio as I have JAWS set
to read at about 350wpm much faster than the speed of someone speaking on
the site. Music in the background can be especially problematic. If the
volume of the site audio is low enough and not overpowering I can still use
the screen reader to scroll through text at the speed I want and find any
needed links.
Chuck
----- Original Message -----
From: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010 2:11 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] WAI-ARIA, mouseover pop-ups, and audio content


> 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
>