Moderated Re: What region am I in?
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Mike B.
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Hi Mark,
Read all of the following and hopefully it'll
help:
Original Message
From: JM Casey Hi everyone. I was recently talking to some people designing a website, and attempting to describe the experience using a screen-reader. I explained about quick navigation, the virtual cursor/buffer, and the various types of elements to which a screen-reader can quickly position its reading cursor. Although I have yet to talk to the actual developer, and I think he might have a greater understanding of this, I was unable to adequately describe a "region", and how navigating by regions, or quickly jumping to the "main region", has become essential on, for example, my bank website, which is full of junk. Essentially, nobody seemed very familiar with this idea of "regions". I found this page: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/examples/landmarks/region.html Which provides a decent explanation. I'm still
only vaguely sure what aria
is, though. Does anyone familiar with web-coding on the
list feel like chiming in, I
wonder? JM From: Roger Newell OK, this is going to be a bit of a rant, but please read it all because you will hopefully find it interesting and important. About ten years ago, a new concept was
invented. It was called Web
2.0. It isn't a new "version" of the web, but rather a new approach to what the web is and what it can do. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the web was simply a portal for reading and editing basic information, but around 2008 or so, this began tochange with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and more comprehensive websites. People started using the web for everything from banking to advanced document creation to even viewing and manipulating the files on other devices. To keep up with this, The World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) created
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). Many web developers saw the need to use nonstandard controls on their websites. For example, rather than having a button that advanced a user to a completely different page to see information, they wanted to have controls that expanded and collapsed different parts of a page. To let screen reader users know exactly what they were seeing, ARIA can be used to tell the screen reader and the blind user something like, "Hey. This is a nonstandard control. Just think of it as a button and you'll be okay. And by the way, right now, it's open, so there's more information to see on this page." Web developers can use ARIA to give sections of their pages custom region names. As an example, go to the Training Downloads Page of the Freedom Scientific website. A few years after ARIA came along, HTML5 (the
latest version of the
markup language used to code websites) was released. This gave web developers a lot of new semantic tools to play with because it was hoped that they would use to identify different parts of their pages so that one day, when AI would be advanced enough to read and comprehend webpages themselves, they would be able to more easily analyse websites using these semantic tags. Have you ever heard JAWS say something like "article" or "content information"? There are also tags for naming regions. These are some of the new tags in HTML5, but be aware that sometimes JAWS does not speak the correct name for the tag, which is one reason why JAWS is only somewhat standards-compliant. In JAWS 2018, you have the ability to customize what tags JAWS speaks aloud. To see this, go to Settings Center > Web/HTML/PDF > Reading > Customize Web Verbosity Levels or something like that. So how do ARIA and HTML5 go together to
announce regions? The answer
is that they often overlap. This page (https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html) explains this in greater detail and may be of more use to the people doing the web design. It is somewhat strange that we can access this page as it is part of a paid course, but it came up in Google search results. So, to summarize, if at all possible, the web
developers should
embrace both HTML5 and ARIA to make the most accessible website possible. Sorry for the long
explanation.
Roger From: JM Casey Thank you very much, Roger. No need to apologise; this was exactly the sort of thing I needed to read. Thanks for the page reference as well; I will show it to my contact and maybe she can pass it along to the developer. I understand the concept of web 2.0 and HTML 5; it was just good to get all this stuff clarified a bit, especially in the case of "aria". So thanks again. JM Take care and stay safe. Mike. Sent from my iBarstool. Go Rams! Main's Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite government program. ----- Original Message -----
From: Mark
Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2020 6:50 AM
Subject: What region am I in? |
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