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Number of posts in this thread: 7 (In chronological order)
From: England, Kristina
Date: Dec 1, 2016 11:10AM
Subject: Website Sharing Widgets
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Hi everyone,
We are just finishing up a redesign of one of our sites to align it with WCAG 2.0 guidelines.  In testing, we found that the Share This widget is causing a keyboard trap.  We looked into possibly switching to AddThis but found a 2015 forum post on WebAIM that the same issue was occurring with that widget.  We currently use Drupal and were wondering if others have a suggestion for a sharing widget we can replace Share This with or if the AddThis issue has perhaps been resolved in the last year?
Thanks!
Kristina England | PMP
Web Services |IT Strategy, Research, and Communications
University Information Technology Services
UMass Office of the President
(774) 455-7874;  = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = <mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
https://www.umassp.edu/uits
From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Dec 1, 2016 11:32AM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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Possibly an aside, but: do you have stats that show the widget is 
actually being used? Only reason I ask is that back in the day when I 
managed a large university site, we added one of those widgets, and I 
hooked it up to analytics...after about 6 months, it turned out that 
only a dozen or so visitors actually used the widget...
P
On 01/12/2016 19:10, England, Kristina wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We are just finishing up a redesign of one of our sites to align it with WCAG 2.0 guidelines.  In testing, we found that the Share This widget is causing a keyboard trap.  We looked into possibly switching to AddThis but found a 2015 forum post on WebAIM that the same issue was occurring with that widget.  We currently use Drupal and were wondering if others have a suggestion for a sharing widget we can replace Share This with or if the AddThis issue has perhaps been resolved in the last year?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Kristina England | PMP
> Web Services |IT Strategy, Research, and Communications
> University Information Technology Services
> UMass Office of the President
> (774) 455-7874;  = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = <mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> https://www.umassp.edu/uits
>
>
>
> > > > >
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
From: Florence Lee
Date: Dec 1, 2016 11:49AM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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We were recently using AddThis and removed it since it had the same keyboard trap issue as the ShareThis widget. Haven't found a replacement for it and the usage of it wasn't very high.
Florence 
On 12/1/16, 1:32 PM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Patrick H. Lauke" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =  on behalf of  = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
    Possibly an aside, but: do you have stats that show the widget is 
    actually being used? Only reason I ask is that back in the day when I 
    managed a large university site, we added one of those widgets, and I 
    hooked it up to analytics...after about 6 months, it turned out that 
    only a dozen or so visitors actually used the widget...
    
    P
    
    On 01/12/2016 19:10, England, Kristina wrote:
    > Hi everyone,
    >
    > We are just finishing up a redesign of one of our sites to align it with WCAG 2.0 guidelines.  In testing, we found that the Share This widget is causing a keyboard trap.  We looked into possibly switching to AddThis but found a 2015 forum post on WebAIM that the same issue was occurring with that widget.  We currently use Drupal and were wondering if others have a suggestion for a sharing widget we can replace Share This with or if the AddThis issue has perhaps been resolved in the last year?
    >
    > Thanks!
    >
    >
    > Kristina England | PMP
    > Web Services |IT Strategy, Research, and Communications
    > University Information Technology Services
    > UMass Office of the President
    > (774) 455-7874;  = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = <mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
    > https://www.umassp.edu/uits
    >
    >
    >
    >     >     >     >     >
    
    -- 
    Patrick H. Lauke
    
    www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
    http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
    twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
From: England, Kristina
Date: Dec 1, 2016 12:01PM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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Thank you both!  We've asked for the analytics on usage and are waiting to hear back on that data.  Our of our editors had a follow up question that I forgot to ask in my original post which was whether or not folks saw a difference in accessibility behavior between the free versions of AddThis and ShareThis and the paid version (I'm assuming not, but we are using the free version and can't verify). 
From: Gijs Veyfeyken
Date: Dec 2, 2016 1:27AM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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There's an accessible share widget in the Web Experience Toolkit, a collaborative open source project led by the Government of Canada:
http://wet-boew.github.io/v4.0-ci/docs/ref/share/share-en.html <http://wet-boew.github.io/v4.0-ci/docs/ref/share/share-en.html> 
Share This and Add This know about their accessibility problems for years but never acted on them (I've asked).
There's also the privacy issue, these buttons enable a lot of tracking.
And thirdly, like Patrick said, do people use it? It's clutter in my opinion.
Kind regards,
Gijs
---
Gijs Veyfeyken
AnySurfer - towards an accessible internet
http://www.anysurfer.be/en <http://www.anysurfer.be/en>
Brussels - Belgium
From: Mallory
Date: Dec 6, 2016 4:17PM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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sharingbuttons.io might also be an option. Lets those 2 out of a million
people who use these things still use them, but now you control all the
code and thus the accessibility.
On Fri, Dec 2, 2016, at 09:27 AM, Gijs Veyfeyken wrote:
> There's an accessible share widget in the Web Experience Toolkit, a
> collaborative open source project led by the Government of Canada:
> http://wet-boew.github.io/v4.0-ci/docs/ref/share/share-en.html
> <http://wet-boew.github.io/v4.0-ci/docs/ref/share/share-en.html> 
> 
> Share This and Add This know about their accessibility problems for years
> but never acted on them (I've asked).
> There's also the privacy issue, these buttons enable a lot of tracking.
> And thirdly, like Patrick said, do people use it? It's clutter in my
> opinion.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Gijs
> 
> ---
> Gijs Veyfeyken
> AnySurfer - towards an accessible internet
> http://www.anysurfer.be/en <http://www.anysurfer.be/en>
> Brussels - Belgium
> 
> > > >
From: Gijs Veyfeyken
Date: Dec 7, 2016 1:19AM
Subject: Re: Website Sharing Widgets
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Thanks Mallory, bookmarked.
Unfortunately, not quite ready to suggest to developers as an accessible alternative yet. 
I'll try to get the redundant aria-labels on the links removed and focus outline added.
I see there's already an issue filed for focus styles. 
Regards,
Gijs
