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Re: how to best indicate facets to screenreader users?

for

From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Jan 25, 2012 10:15AM

Jared Smith wrote:

>> I can't imagine the most
>> people know that they are called "facets" unless they work in web
>> design, librarianship, or some other information-related field.
>
> I obviously work in this field and I have no idea what you're talking
> about. Do you have an example of facets?

*facepalm* Sorry -- I suspect it's a term more widely used in
some industries than others, and now that I look around it seems
to be mostly used in e-commerce and libraries. Sorry about that!

Faceted navigation is the technique for narrowing down the
results of the search by clicking on displayed filters which are
exposed based on what are the sensible filters for the search
you've done, so you don't need to know much about searching or a
site's content to be given more and more useful information about
what you can find.

In general, faceted navigation is what people are used to seeing
on large e-commerce sites. If you search at Amazon for "web" you
will be given a choice of "Department" (books, music, clothing
and accessories, etc.), "Format" (Paperback, audio CD, board
book, etc.), "Author", etc. In this way, you don't need to know
ahead of time what Amazon has, because the faceted navigation let
you know that there are 14,104 items in their "Health and
Personal Care" department with the keyword "web".

There is some parallel to the Amazon faceted navigation and most
e-commerce sites: Best Buy, Etsy, Target, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search

In libraries, it's a way of letting you see format, author, year,
etc. Worldcat.org has a pretty good example of faceted search.

-Deborah