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Re: How do screen readers experience this image rotator?

for

From: Angela French
Date: May 18, 2011 4:48PM

It's run with Jquery. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick Burke
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 3:40 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] How do screen readers experience this image rotator?

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
>
>
>