WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Examples of accessible flow charts on Web pages

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: May 30, 2006 4:00PM

Jennifer Sutton wrote:

> We have been brainstorming solutions, and I'm not entirely thrilled with
> any that we've come up with. For example, we could show the textual
> elements within the image, with alt text on the arrows that show the
> relationships, or we could have a long desc. (which doesn't thrill me
> due to the hit and miss support for that. The last idea I had, which
> also isn't ideal, would be to have a second page, linked from the
> page-image, such that the user would clickthrough to a textual
> description.

Sorry, no examples, but some random ramblings:

those last two ideas aren't that dissimilar, as longdesc would need to
link to somewhere (either a fragment identified on the same page, or a
second page) anyway. Although support for the longdesc attribute itself
is shameful in current browsers (as a sidenote, see my longdesc
extension for Firefox http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/55/ which
still doesn't make it keyboard accessible but at least gives *some*
modicum of support for mouse users), you could conceivably have both a
longdesc and a link adjacent to the image (but please, not a
"D-link"...something a tad more descriptive, such as "explanation of
process X" or whatever) pointing at a description in plain, simple
language - which incidentally may benefit all users, depending on how
complex the graphical flow diagram is. In fact, it may help
comprehension when read side by side with the actual diagram
itself...which may obviate the entire problem by having both visible on
the same page, next to each other. Of course, it all depends on the
actual situation.


--
Patrick H. Lauke
___________
re