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Re: Dynamic search results

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From: Thad C
Date: Mar 1, 2016 8:22PM

Hi Jennifer,

I have typically shied away from responding for fear of giving bad advice
but here is my take on what I am seeing based on a test.

It looks like when the initial notification of the "Additional Results"
dialog displays, the DOM has already rendered. I would say as long as you
are indicating to the user that there is a waiting period by identifying
the presence and updates made by the progress bar to AT and then reading
the dialog pop-up when it appears, that if you make all the elements in the
DOM accessible there is no issue because it looks like the content has
stopped updating at that point and is static. The user then has the option
to "Add Results". There is a spinner icon whose progress should be
announced to AT. It again appears that there is a specific time that the
DOM updates and a time that it stops updating and becomes static. I didn't
see in my test any live areas or AJAX updates after content updates were
initiated by the user.

Hope that helps.

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:48 PM, J Vine < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> We are looking at vendor services for searching articles in an academic
> library. One of the options is a federated search, which means that the
> service goes out and searches several sources at once, and fills in the
> results as the sources respond.
>
> There are some examples here:
> http://www.deepwebtech.com/...product-trial/try-it-now/ When you do a
> search, the results page shows articles from the first few sources, then
> adds tabs and updates counts as sources respond, and eventually pops up a
> dialog giving the total number found, with the option to refresh the result
> list to show all articles.
>
> There are all kinds of issues with the results pages - document structure,
> alt text, form labels, mostly easy to fix. What I'm wondering about is how
> challenging it would be to make the dynamic updating in multiple locations
> really usable for a screen reader.
>
> Is anyone aware of a site that does something like this effectively? (I
> mean the dynamic updating, in any context.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jennifer Vine
> UX Designer
> Digital Library Systems & Services
> Stanford University Libraries
> > > > >