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Re: Activating controls with hidden accessible names using speech recognition

for

From: _mallory
Date: Feb 10, 2016 8:52AM

"The icons are more easily recognizable at a glance than text labels"

Actually I remember reading a study (or a reference to a study) showing
that in an application, what users really remember is *where* the icon
is, rather than what the icon looks like. Other things like the colour
and size were also more remembered.

I like the idea of the UA exposing these names to any user who asks.

_mallory

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 09:15:23AM -0500, Robert Fentress wrote:
> All good points. However, I can hear the person whose site I'm
> evaluating saying something like, "We'll, my application is very
> complex and making these things into icons allows me to fit more
> functionality into a limited space, thus making it so users do not
> have to spend a lot of time rooting through separate pages to get to
> the functionality they need. The icons are more easily recognizable
> at a glance than text labels would be and thus reduce the cognitive
> load, once you are familiar with what they mean."
>
> I like the idea of having a way of enabling text labels if desired.
> However, I have a hard time imagining how that could happen without a
> major interface redesign at this point.
>
> Oh well, I guess I just need to make them aware of the issues and
> provide possible solutions. It's up to them figure out how (or if)
> they can implement them given their resources.
>
> There is also the question of at what point this becomes a user agent
> responsibility. I mean, the information is there and I'd argue speech
> control software should provide the option to make it available
> visually. If every label must be visible to everyone all the time,
> what is the point of things like aria-label and chained ids for
> aria-labelledby?
>