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Thread: Examples of accessible flow charts on Web pages

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From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Tue, May 30 2006 3:50PM
Subject: Examples of accessible flow charts on Web pages
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Hello:

I'm wondering if folks have Web page examples they are proud of that
reflect accessible methods of presenting flow charts.

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.

I'd love to consider some example pages that present accessible flow
charts. I'll especially be able to benefit from responses through the
end of the day on Thursday, June 1.

Thank you in advance.
Best,
Jennifer




From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Tue, May 30 2006 4:00PM
Subject: Re: Examples of accessible flow charts on Web pages
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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

From: chris
Date: Wed, May 31 2006 11:50AM
Subject: Re: Examples of accessible flow charts on Web pages
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On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 14:49 -0700, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
> I'd love to consider some example pages that present accessible flow
> charts.
Hi Jennifer,
The issue of family trees, org charts and flow charts has popped up here
a couple times over the past few years - see

http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=1746&;id=4173#4173

http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2547&;id=7450#7450

this has a link to an example
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=898&;id=2292#2292

this post was about flow charts and has an example
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=4507

the thread appears to be broken in this query about family trees, but
you can pick them out.
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_archive.php?sort_by=2&;from=50&srch_mnth=7&srch_yr=2003#maincontentlink

Since the problem is articulation of a set of shapes that have
relationships, an org chart seems relevant?

hth
chris