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Re: What do you think of the following table (is this acceptably accessible)?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 14, 2011 12:03AM

Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

> I have been asked for an opinion on a search results table for the
> Library for the Blind in Iceland.
[...]
> http://hbleit.bbi.is/

I find the search page rather confusing

> (leit is Icelandic for search".

Yes, but search what? The text under it means "keyboard shortcuts". It
really took me some time that the text was meant to help in searches,
not to refer to the topic area. Besides, the search form seems to
duplicate the form that appears earlier on the page, in upper right corner.

> Firstly, there appears to be Javascript that is executed when
> something is enterred into the edit field,

There's a lot of JavaScript on the page. It would take some time to
study what really happens, but the effects are surely confusing. I see
the "Sjá allt" (See all) button in the search results and cannot
understand its meaning. Clicking on it seems to give me the same results.

> The second problem I have with this table is a little plus sign, which
> Jaws called "expand".

In the visual presentation, there are two kinds of plus signs: circled
pluses in the first column (with no column header), and green pluses in
the last column together with two other cryptic icons. The different
pluses have different effects, and this can be deduced from their
tooltip texts.

The first type of plus signs are images with alt text [Expand], so this
explains why Jaws calls them "expand". This is a rather typical example
of incomplete localization: textual content is in Icelandic, but alt
texts are in English. This could be an oversight, or it might be caused
by software limitations, or perhaps the person who wrote the alt texts
didn't quite understand the idea of alt texts. Probably an oversight, as
the green plus signs have their alt text in Icelandic.

> When you click on it information about the book
> is displayed, I guess plot summary/publisher notes.

Yes, and the information appears to be in a specific format.

> This is not working consistently for me with different screen readers,
> and "expand" is a very vague description.

It's vague, and it would be better to say something that corresponds to
"details about the book" or maybe just "details". It would be vague too,
but a text that gets repeated over and over again on a page should be
fairly short.

It would be more normal to make the title of the book a link, so that no
special icon would be needed. In this case, they apparently didn't want
to make it a link at all. When you click on the icon, the browser sends
a request to the server and gets the detailed information, then inserts
it into the page. This may sound efficient, as no full page is loaded
and no new window is opened, but it's no wonder that the operation may
confuse assistive software.

I haven't studied the code in detail, but typically in situations like
this, the browser dynamically inserts, via JavaScript code, new elements
into the document tree. Assistive software might get no notice of this,
i.e. it might not realize that a change has taken place.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/