WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Assistive Device Behaviour Chart

for

From: Terence de Giere
Date: Aug 29, 2003 8:37AM

Gez --

This is something I always wanted to do but never had the time, or
perhaps, the inclination.

I would suggest a systematic approach by creating small web pages that
initially only deal with one HTML element at a time (for the block
elements - inline element need to be inside some other element). For
example, the IMG element. Make a page that has the IMG element with an
image with alternate text, without alternative text, with null alternate
text, and blank space alternate text. Make a second set of these with
the same parameters and add the title attribute. Copy everything again
and add the longdesc attribute with a real image description file
linked. Copy these to make another set but break the SRC to the image so
it cannot load - sometimes mistakes are made on sites, and the link to
the image is wrong, or an image may not sometimes load for other reasons
such as heavy traffic. This way one can find out how each technology
responds to the presence or lack of information. This can also apply to
low vision and normal user for an image. If the image does not show,
what do they see?

Over time you could build a full catalog of HTML elements pages that
would allow others to test a particular technology's response to that
particular structure in a web page. This can be important for usability,
because accessibility guidelines do not always work. An example of this
is the title attribute for FRAMES. It is not supported by all
technology. But sometimes the name attribute is, and creating a human
readable understandable name attribute (without spaces!) will help a
number of users determine what the FRAME content is.

The web page http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html gives a
summary of all the elements in HTML 4.01 and is the basis for the the
XHTML element names as well. This could get quite complicated in all the
permutations, so I would think carefully about what would be most
important to present.

By the way in pwWebSpeak, in the last version released, ALT + i takes
you to the longdesc description file, and ALT + b takes you back to the
original page.

Terence de Giere
<EMAIL REMOVED>




----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/