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Thread: multiple file formats
Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)
From: Cheryl Amato
Date: Fri, Jun 04 2010 2:51PM
Subject: multiple file formats
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I'm just wondering what's the thinking on presenting the same file in
multiple file formats. In particular, how would you word the link text?
Would a properly coded data table be the best solution? I have several files
that are available in up to 5 different formats each.
Thanks for the help.
--
Cheryl Amato
Web Designer
443-803-3325
From: Egan, Bim
Date: Fri, Jun 04 2010 6:21PM
Subject: Re: multiple file formats
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Hi Cheryl,
A table is certainly one good way of displaying several different
formats for different files. The table should be marked up with the
File Title column as TH headings though, as well as the top row. The
format links could be headed by a cell with COLSPAN and SCOPE attributes
to avoid repetition. The links themselves could include the format and
file size, which might be important for more complex file formats.
Example data row:
2008 Report and accounts PDF 109KB Word 480KB RTF
5.2MB HTML 20KB
The SUMMARY can be used to let screen readers know what to expect,
especially if it's concise.
Cheers,
Bim
From: Korpela Jukka
Date: Sun, Jun 06 2010 2:48AM
Subject: Re: multiple file formats
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Cheryl Amato wrote:
> I'm just wondering what's the thinking on presenting the same file in
> multiple file formats. In particular, how would you word the link text?
> Would a properly coded data table be the best solution?
Naming the links in an accessibly way would be mission impossible. The
usual way is to use file format names as link texts, causing links with
identical names point to different resources. This is surely a no-no.
Adding some technical jargon to the names, like file size, would hardly
help much and would create problems of its own (and can well create
identical texts by accident).
It's not a matter of using table, it's a matter of putting links to many
resources in different formats on a single page. The number of links
becomes large and their names cannot be descriptive without being
unacceptably long.
So I would suggest setting up a page with links to the resources
generically, without file format issues. Each of the link would point to a
small page about that resource, and on that page, you can well have link
texts like "plain text", "Word format", or "PDF format", as they would be
the _only_ links (except general navigation links).
So the idea is to select the resource first, then the format. A rare case
where this might not be feasible is a situation where not all resources
are available in all formats and the user may wish to take this into
account when selecting the resource - i.e., it would not be a simple
matter of a two-phase selection, but the availability of formats could
affect the choice of resource. Then you might wish to set up two "front
pages" for the material, one by resource and one by format.
Yucca
From: Randall Pope
Date: Mon, Jun 07 2010 9:24AM
Subject: Re: multiple file formats
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One of the Braille readers or users, is they don't like (actually hate)
long links names of any kind and multi pages that required multi clicking to
pages get the link.
One idea is to name the file in heading and list the format option as a list
under the heading.
For example:
<h2>AADB Today - June Edition</h2>
<ul>
<li>Plain Text</li>
<li>MS Word</li>
<li>PDF</li>
</ul>
I usually place plain text first on the list, to slightly lessen the search
for most braille readers favorite format, plain text.
With Warm Regards,
Randall "Randy" Pope
American Association of the Deaf-Blind
Website: http://www.aadb.org
301 495-4402 VP/TTY
301 495-4403 Voice
301 495-4404 Fax
AIM: RandyAADB
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