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Re: Lists of links to alternative formats

for

From: ********
Date: Aug 21, 2006 11:00AM

This is a great question. I have to tackle the issue on the Division of Blind Services web site. Here's how we solved the problem http://dbs.myflorida.com/newsletter/index.shtml (touch and listen has three formats). Let me know what you think.

-----Original Message-----
>From: "Jukka K. Korpela" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Sent: Aug 19, 2006 7:10 AM
>To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Lists of links to alternative formats
>
>On Fri, 18 Aug 2006, Paul R. Bohman wrote:
>
>> ... But the part I'm most interested in is how to represent links to
>> alternative formats.
>
>That's a tricky problem, but let's consider the users' needs first. If
>there is a collection of documents in different formats, the user may wish
>to act in two ways:
>1) select the document first, then the format
>2) select the format(s) first, if some formats are either strongly
>preferred or strongly avoided.
>
>The former is more common. The latter could be handled by providing some
>tools, like alternative lists or some dynamic (scripted) tool for
>removing some formats or selecting a particular format.
>
>Selecting the document first is easier if there is no other selection that
>_could_ be made on the page. People with cognitive disabilities will
>probably find it easier to make one choice from a list than a
>"two-dimensional" choice.
>
>Thus, logically, you need a simple list of documents, or perhaps nested
>lists or a table, but anyway organized by document content only, and
>naturally using descriptive document names. In a simple approach,
>selecting a document would then open a new small page containing links to
>the different versions of that document. Naming the links would not be an
>issue any more; you could use even format names, or perhaps a little more
>logically "HTML version of Introduction to Foo Bar", "PDF version of
>Introduction to Foo Bar", etc.
>
>If opening a new page seems too clumsy, you could set up a piece of
>JavaScript that opens a menu within the current page, with a link to the
>small page as backup for non-JavaScript browsing situations.
>
>This approach would simulate the ideal (?) solution where document format
>selection takes place automatically by user preferences. The ideal
>solution is technically quite possible as far as the protocols are
>considered: you could set up content negotation in HTTP, so that a browser
>would request for a document using a URL like
>http://www.example.com/foobar and send a suitable Accept header,
>specifying the acceptability of different media types, and the server
>would then pick up the media type (among the versions it's got) that best
>fits the request. However, this fails for two main reasons: browsers send
>a more or less fixed and often nonsensical Accept header (e.g., IE says
>that it will accept any media type, with no expressed preference between
>them), and even if the allowed users to customize such behavior, most
>users would not do so (as we can see from the fact that Accept-Language
>headers, which _are_ customizable by users, have very rarely been actually
>selected or even checker by users).
>
>But this can easily be simulated using a link to a list of alternate
>formats (which is more or less what content negotiation is expected to
>do as a fallback, i.e. when none of the available formats is acceptable
>according to what the browser says).
>
>--
>Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
>
>


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