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Re: How do screen readers experience this image rotator?

for

From: Patrick Burke
Date: May 18, 2011 4:42PM

At 03:13 PM 5/18/2011, Angela French wrote:
>Patrick - If I keep the list, but use null value on the alt
>attribute, do you still perceive the list? Does it still waste your
>time and act as a nuisance?
I tried saving & editing offline. In that situation, using alt=""
makes the items "disappear", except for the bullets indicating that
list items exist.

However, as I mentioned before, the list markup doesn't come through
on the live version (I don't know why not), so the bullet markers
might not show up either.


Patrick

>-----Original Message-----
>From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick Burke
>Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 2:12 PM
>To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] How do screen readers experience this image rotator?
>
>Hi Angela,
>
>With Jaws 12 (build 1158) & Firefox 4, I do indeed get the whole
>list. Some of the images seem to be repeated or split up, so there
>are 60 or so items. For some reason they are not reported as a list.
>
>Scrolling image banners are very popular with designers, & usually
>very annoying for screen reader users. (Either because they refresh
>the page every time they scroll, or just introduce new content when
>you didn't expect it. So if I wanted to backtrack to reread
>something, I would find that what I was looking for had disappeared,
>without much clue as to why.) Fortunately you don't have those problems...
>
>Overall I would say, consider what the purpose of the images is. In
>this case, do they show that the Board serves some parts of the
>state & not others? Or serves colleges at specific locations? In
>those situations, an explicit list or statement to that effect would
>be more useful.
>
>If it's a series of images meant to evoke the varied landscapes of
>the state, then null alt text on the images might be best.
>
>IN general, if anyone has an accessible solution for the scrolling
>banner construct, I and the devs on my campus could definitely use it!
>
>Thanks much,
>Patrick
>
>
>