WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Experience with MS Teams

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Mar 29, 2018 1:21PM

I personally am not in favor of virtual cursor/browse mode going away. The fact that JAWS has a touch cursor mode for software and NVDA has an object navigation mode shows that being able to navigate through non-interactive items is very important. VoiceOver also allows navigation in different modes allowing you to drill down and quickly navigate among different types of elements and to non-interactive content. For example, you can navigate or swipe and then go into edit mode to interact with an input field.

Taking away the users ability to get at the granularity of that information and replacing it with custom hotkeys to move between items in my opinion has not been successful for most users. How that browser mode is built or caches or not cached may change due to necessity on platforms-- but at some level users of screen readers will still need to navigate the accessibility tree without relying solely on navigation through interactive content.

Jonathan

Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
Level Access
<EMAIL REMOVED>
703.637.8957 office

Visit us online:
Website | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Blog

See you at CSUN in March!

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Pratik Patel
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 12:00 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Experience with MS Teams

Having the discussion about application mode is important as Microsoft and Google both attempt to push web apps as a standard. While application mode could be problematic if not implemented correctly, I do not agree that it is useless. I strongly believe that it is an exaggeration to suggest that it is. When it is implemented, it becomes vital to ensure that focus management along with keyboard navigation are managed. One of the reasons why application mode is not implemented correctly is because the experience, in its entirety, has to be managed. The application has to be navigable. Users have been used to navigating the web by using the virtual cursor. (There is a move afoot that will eventually eliminate the virtual cursor.) But, in the meantime, examples such as Gmail, Google Inbox, Google Docs, etc serve as excellent pointers to developers for instances of how the application mode could be managed. I do agree that the application mode is not necessary for all apps. It has to be chosen correctly. But it should not be ignored either. Poor implementations in the past should not be used as examples of why it should not be done. They should, however, serve as examples of how not to do it. If we continue to argue that application mode is bad, we risk leaving behind a group of people. Let's make sure that web apps have as much usability for blind users as they promise to for sighted individuals.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 12:55 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Experience with MS Teams

Application mode in any application is wrong. AS developers from my experience impleament the feature incorrectly. I am not a fan of the application mode at all. There is only rare cases when it is really necessary. Such as multi-media wigets. I have only ever seen one impleamentation of the application mode correctly done. I do come back to the question, why a web app when a normal desktop app could have done it equally as well and more than likely easier. But that is a completely different discussion.


Sean
-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Ajay Sharma
Sent: Wednesday, 28 March 2018 4:15 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Experience with MS Teams

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I guess for most of the screen reader users application role is tiresome. So one question if everything could be achievable by alternate means, why application role is there?

Or what could be done for making it a pleasant experience to the users or it is just a matter of perception.

Ajay