WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: examples of accessible document downloads

for

From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net
Date: Aug 29, 2011 6:18PM

Angela,

As a sighted voice/keyboard-only user, I vastly prefer links to buttons, because that lets me control how I want to interact with the documents via the context menu. For example, I can tell my broswer to give me a list of links in the page, edit that list, and download them in a batch, or save the URLs for later if I'm not in a good place to download (eg. not my computer). I dislike javascript based downloaders for the same reason: I can't manipulate and use the download URL.

If you look at this site -- <http://archiveofourown.org/works/244621>; -- there's a "download" link which, when selected, expands to a list of links providing the four download options: "MOBI, EPUB, PDF, HTML". I like that for a page with one download, multiple formats. (I just tested that link with NVDA and had issues with it, though I do know at least one JAWS user who is happy with it. So it's not perfect.) For me, as a voice and keyboard user, that's perfect.

The internet archive works similarly, as at <http://www.archive.org/details/1872sanskriten00moniuoft>;. Notice the section under the heading level one titled "View the Book". Each available format is a link with the format name as the link text.

Those are both the simplest case, of course. For more complicated lists, as you request, I still prefer links, ideally with unique names (so I can dictate the name directly), as at <http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/html/guides/weekly.shtml>;.

(When looking for examples I found some *terrible* US government pages. Ugh, TIGER data is hard to grab. Standardise on a set of best practices, US government!)

-Deborah