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Re: examples of accessible document downloads

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Aug 30, 2011 8:57AM

Hi Deborah

I did not know about links vs buttons for your situation. Thanks for
enlightening me. :)
Whichever method is chosen, I just want to make sure it is made clear
out of context that the link/button being used is to download the
file, as a screen reader user that's really all i ask.


On 8/30/11, <EMAIL REMOVED> < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>