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Re: Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 7, 2018 2:38PM

I recently saw a statement that there are about 1.3 billion websites. I doubt if even 1% of those have been designed and tested to achieve a good level of accessibility. Screen readers therefore have to do the best they can with the other 99%. If some developers are relying on a screen reader to do a quick test, that doesn't seem a good enough reason to impair the user experience on the 99% of website where the developers didn't even test at all.

Testing with assistive technologies is important, but developers should not be using screen readers to assess the level of standards compliance of their code - there are much more appropriate tools and techniques for that.

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: 07 May 2018 17:00
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...

I agree the user experience would be worse, and the screen is intended for the person that needs it and not the developer, but it also gives a developer a false sense of accomplishment if their code sounds good. For example, jaws will try to find a label for an input field even if the developer didn't code one. That's bad for the developer but good for the end user. Of course, a11y testing should be done on a variety of platforms but there are unfortunately many cases of a quick test and people think they're good.

Glen

On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 3:40 AM, Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Professional-grade screen readers have always used heuristics to clean
> up bad design - it's one of the key things that sets them apart from
> more basic screen readers. The user experience would be far worse if
> they did nothing more than present the information that has been coded.
>
> Steve Green
> Managing Director
> Test Partners Ltd
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
> glen walker
> Sent: 07 May 2018 00:18
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...
>
> Screen readers should not have to clean up bad design.
>
> But that sounds kind of harsh. I would give them the benefit of the
> doubt and say they were trying to do the right thing but overdid it.
> In any event, a screen reader should not have to fix it. It should
> stick with what it does best and present the information that has been coded.
>
> Glen
>
> On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 1:39 PM, Jonathan Cohn < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I was just reading through the story about Alice's Restaurant that
> > was in The Boston Globe this week. While an interesting story, it
> > was getting very frustrating by the end with VoiceOver on the
> > Macintosh reading essentially the same description for each picture four times.
> >
> > It would read once for the start of the figure once for the end of
> > the figure, then the alt text and the text below the picture were also read.
> > except for the alt attribute on the graphic itself all the text was
> > exactly the same. So, our wonderful HTML5 standards have caused in
> > at least one screen reader for graphical descriptions to be read four times.
> >
> > OK, I can figure out how to develop a figure that would not be as
> > verbose though this In fact, if one puts the Macintosh in "Group"
> > web navigation it won't be overly redundant.
> >
> > But is this issue essentially a Browser / screen reader issue or a
> > design issue. I.E. if figure name = caption name = alt-text should
> > we be requiring our Screen Reader vendors to clean this up, or
> > should the underlying HTML generaed by Newspapers only include
> > alternative text if they are not using figure /figcaption?
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > Jonathan Cohn
> >
> >
> >
> > > > > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> > > >
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> > > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >