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Re: information on the type of technology used for the effect in this web page

for

From: Mallory
Date: May 17, 2021 1:36AM

Hi,
A step-by-step feature as the default (staying in place makes no sense, each visible comment is often specifically a comment on a small part of each painting. Adding an arrow to point would be pointing at something too small for many of us) and then checking if the user's got prefers-reduced-motion not on, allowing the swoop-zoom thing. Although without swoop-zoom, while that makes me queasy I would be lost as to where I was on the painting, because I'm always zoomed in quite a bit in my browser. But the motion/scrolling issue could be easily fixed.

I dunno what VoiceOver's problem is (or maybe it's Safari not exposing the content?) but checking with NVDA/FF/Chrome, I'm just Arrow-browsing the page and getting all the visible text. Which makes sense: the browsers seem to also be exposing the paragraphs in the acc-tree as paragraphs.

I agree with Neil's idea that first there should be alt text of the piece being discussed, and then probably a small invisible hint for each "shift" mentioning what part of the piece is being zoomed into. Since this is just a long article with a pile of text, this invisible text could simply be that: invisible (offscreen techniques for example) text, in the content order.

I think it would be fairly easy, code-wise, to increase the accessibility of this page. NYT has made some other, much more complicated visualisations (moving charts and graphs) where I've thought "there's no way this could be made sufficiently accessible to certain populations" due to those visualisations requiring all users have the ability to take in multiple streams of content at the same time (so if you were deafblind, since there's no such things as a timing-based multiple-exposure haptic device that I know of, you'd simply be forced to explore each bit of the visualisation individually and in sequence. Which means you'd miss some of the relationships). One of the ones I'm thinking of was a moving chart showing several (selectable by the user in a toolbar above!) human demographics as their marital status, race, age, and socio-economic levels changed over the course of 30 years. Like, it was wow. Or just the other month I saw a history of the shapes and positions of the earth's tectonic plates over the course of a billion years... also NYT I think, although the writer writes for Nat'l Geo.

Even this simpler moving chart linked below (where the x and y axes are changing over time), I can't imagine a way of making it accessible to the same level as it is to someone who can see sufficiently (although contrast with the yellow-on-white could certainly be improved): https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1072763227337977861 (it has sound but it's just music, so this is a visual-only chart).
The closest I could think of for this chart is a horse-race or baseball-game style speed announcer, who by their sequential nature MUST leave out the majority of information and focus only on the first few leaders, and only occasionally mention the numbers. Another solution would be to offer a whole other interactive version of the data set which allows all users to "step through" each year and then explore the various amounts of money and (new) order of countries the y-axis at their leisure, and probably a toolbar accompanied to allow people to skip to years or set orders-by-GDP (and then get the year as a result), something like that.

When professional developers say "accessibility is hard" and they're talking about making a hamburger work correctly, I scowl. But there are absolutely places where it cannot be anything but cost a lot of time, money and effort... which isn't bad. That should encourage us to make tools for content-providers so they can more easily make multiple versions of any throw-away, one-off type media (the biggest argument I get against investing a buttload of time and code into something... most inaccessible things aren't as grand and detailed as this NYT historical-painting thing, but just some quickie something an intern puked out, meant to be viewed that day or something). But then there's the things where you'd spend 6 months trying to build some kind of prototype and it would still be half-assed at best, because solutions haven't yet been found. Whenever I see those, I do say to myself: "accessibility IS hard."

cheers,
_mallory

On Sun, May 16, 2021, at 12:22 AM, Jonathan Avila wrote:
> Wow, this page is dizzying and they hijack the browse zoom as well
> making difficult to comprehend what is going on without feeling ill.
> They need a step by step feature that doesn't' pan to the next item but
> just jumps there or says in one place.
>
> Jonathan
>
>