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Re: please test this method of identifying document icons with hyperlinks

for

From: David Farough
Date: Oct 5, 2011 7:42AM


I agree with Jennifer. The title followed by the document type would be
my preference. I can see though, that people might prefer to have the
icon appear first so that everything lined up vertically, but doing this
causes the problem that Jennifer explained so well. There you have it,
accessibility/usability verses aesthetics.

David Farough
Application Accessibility Coordinator/coordonateur de l'accessibilité
Information Technology Services Directorate /
Direction des services d'information technologiques
Public Service Commission / Commission de la fonction publique
Email / Courriel: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Tel. / Tél: (613) 992-2779

>>> Jennifer Sutton < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 05:42 PM Tuesday, October 04,
2011 >>>
Angela et al:

At 02:17 PM 10/4/2011, you wrote:
>So a links list reads the links in alphabetical order?
>
>JS: It CAN, but it may not necessarily. In JFW, as only one screen
>reader example, I can choose to read the list of links in either tab
>order or alphabetical order.

Perhaps it'll help to mention that, if I know a site well, I may
choose to navigate the links list by pressing the first letter of the
link I want to activate.

I haven't been following the discussion closely, so I will conclude
by mentioning a little story.

I once worked with folks on a site where they insisted on putting
"opens in a new window" at the beginning of every link. It didn't
matter in how many different ways I tried to explain the problem with
the approach.

Yes, it was "accessibility gone wild," especially since these were
pages of resources that were external to the site I was developing.

As a result of this decision, when navigating the links list, every
link started with o.

My vote is that the name of the document (or the site resource) that
I may or may not want to read is more important to me than the
filetype; I'd like to hear the filetype second.

Jennifer




>So what do others think:
>Icon before the link (reads "Document Type" + "link label") or
>Icon after the link (reads "Link label" + "Document type")?
>
>I would think the latter would be preferable.
>
>Thank you for your opinion.
>
><snip>