WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Thread: Accessible story carousel

for

Number of posts in this thread: 2 (In chronological order)

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Wed, Dec 19 2012 8:43PM
Subject: Accessible story carousel
No previous message | Next message →

Yea wise ones.

I have one more question for this year (believe that's it), so wish
you all happy holidays and so on.
The aformentioned page (see previous thread) had another flaw that is
causing me head aches.
It has a news type carousel, where there really is only one news story
template, but it changes every 10 to 20 seconds, often causeing the
focus of both Jaws and NVDA to jump around.
I am wondering whether to find an implementation that lets the news
stories be updated but without disrupting the screen readers, by
consulting a type of accessible image carousel such as can be found
here:
http://hanshillen.github.com/jqtest
or whether I should more strictly insist that the authors of the page
do not go this route, but display a couple of news stories with a "see
more stories" link on the page.
The fact is that they only get a new news item about twice a month
max, so I remain at a loss to understand why they have to make it look
like the news stories are the main emphasis of the page (it is a
library page), while it is not.
So, again, of course I do not want to post every single acccessibility
problem or concern to the list (I don't, not at all), but this is
something that I see increasingly often now, both on pages I am aseked
to consult on, and others I come across as a casual user, and I am
still wondering how to best deal with this, and figured other might be
thinking the same.
Cheers
-B

From: Joe Chidzik
Date: Thu, Dec 20 2012 3:11AM
Subject: Re: Accessible story carousel
← Previous message | No next message

> It has a news type carousel, where there really is only one news story template, but
> it changes every 10 to 20 seconds, often causeing the focus of both Jaws and
> NVDA to jump around.

[Joe Chidzik]
This will also potentially cause problems for sighted users too, who may find these frequent updates intrusive or distracting. This is covered by 2.2.2 Pause, stop, hide. One way of addressing this, which would help in this case, is by adding a pause button to allow users to pause the frequent news story updates. See http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause.html for more info.

I'm surprised that the screenreader is being disrupted by the appearance of this new content. It sounds like there is some scripting which moves the focus to these news stories when they are updated on the page, or that the new story section is coded as an ARIA live region, in which case the screenreader user will be interrupted when the story is changed, and the new content read out. From your description, it doesn't sound a suitable scenario for ARIA live regions but it would be useful if you could provide a link to the page.

Joe