The Problem With Invisible Links

While I’m talking so much about things related to web development, I thought I’d post a little rant about a subject that’s been bothering me for a while now.

Can developers please, please, please JUST STOP IT ALREADY WITH THE INVISIBLE LINKS! I often work with people who are looking at the screen. When I encounter links that they don’t see, this does absolutely nothing but ad confusion for both of us. If a link is not displayed on the screen, it should, at the absolute minimum, be labelled “invisible” by my screen reader. This will stop me from asking sighted counterparts to, say, click the “skip to main content link, then look two or three lines down,” when the skip to main content link only exists for screen readers. This results in exchanges like this:

them: “What skip to main content link?”

me: “the one at the top of the page.”

them: “I don’t see it.”

me: “It’s, like, the first link.”

them: “No, it isn’t.”

me: “Oh, never mind. Just skip down to the main article. Did I spell all those street names right in the second paragraph?”

them: “Nope. You’ve got an extra d in Dundas. Third line. Fourth word.”

me: “Hold on. I think my screen reader splits lines completely different from the browser.”

Congratulations, everyone! We have now reached the point, in accessible technology, where it is almost completely impossible for a blind person and a sighted person to communicate with one another about a web page. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here in the corner, banging my head against the wall. It’s more productive than trying to work with my sighted classmates, some days.

The ARIA Saga Continues

This post is all prompted by Google’s recent addition of ARIA technology to Google news, that I blogged about Yesterday.

My post generated a lot of (unexpected, to me) discussion in the web accessibility community. I feel that I’m much too hard on ARIA in my original posting, because user-facing information about what ARIA does is thin and scattered. I’ve been asked how information about ARIA can be better communicated. Honestly, I don’t feel that the problem, in this case, lies with the developer community. As I said in a comment on my blog entry, the fault is Google’s. Google created a link on Google News and Google Reader to websites enhanced with ARIA. However, it failed to explain what ARIA can do for the user, what software the user must have to take advantage of ARIA, or give any introduction of what changes ARIA brought to Google News. Most users, who have older and out-dated software, will find that the ARIA link does nothing, and leave baffled. Those of us who try and investigate will find information about ARIA directed at developers, that provides little to no information about what ARIA does for us, and how to make it work. When, in my case, I finally found out what ARIA enhanced Google News did, I assumed that was the limit of the technology, and left unimpressed. I think that, at this point, the best thing the Web Accessibility Initiative can do is stress the importance to developers using ARIA of ensuring that the user has software that can support ARIA, and explaining how exactly the ARIA page is different from the non-ARIA page. Perhaps some of this effort should also fall on the shoulders of screen reader programmers; most screen readers have anounced to developers that they support ARIA, but they haven’t explained this feature to their users. Perhaps the WAI could create some sort of user-facing documentation for ARIA that developers could link to whenever they create an ARIA enhanced page; but I’m not really sure that that’s the job of a standards body. As things stand right now, blind users are starting to see ARIA links popping up on accessible websites, trying to find out what ARIA means for them, and coming up confused or empty handed.

My original comment follows:

@Shawn Henry: This seems clear enough, but it’s a document for web developers. To me, the user, this is all just theory. What should probably exist somewhere (and maybe does? Google doesn’t index
everything.) is a page describing websites using the technology, discussing what differences it makes for users (like interaction with google chat, the pop-up menus in gmail, etc),
and what screen reading and browser combos support this technology (the only one I’ve got working
thus far is firefox 3+NVDA; Freedom Scientific says they support it, but something must be broken
on all three of my windows boxes because I just can’t make it work). The people who should probably
write this kind of user document, in fact, are Google. They’ve suddenly presented all screen-reader
users of Google News and Google Reader with a mystery link about “ARIA,” (a link that our sighted
counterparts apparently can’t even see, so we get strange looks when we ask about it) and failed
completely to explain anything at all. When people search for information about ARIA on google
itself, it seems they wind up at either web developer resources, year old discussions of google
reader, or my blog, depending on what keywords they use. IMHO, the way to do this would be to
present a kind of “ARIA information page” the first time the user clicks the ARIA enhanced link,
explaining what software they need to be using, and what extra functionality ARIA ads to the page. Pressing questionmark for help, while an interesting interface enhancement, is just so far removed from anything I would ever think of doing on any normal page, that I won’t try it unless prompted with a “press questionmark for help” message. Otherwise, I’ll go hunting for a help link. Because that’s what you do with web pages: you click links on them.

What Is Google News ARIA?

I’ve gotten a somewhat surprising number of hits to my blog over the last few days, coming from lost googlers searching for strings like “google news aria” and “what is google news aria.” Unfortunately, it seems that Google itself doesn’t have any information posted about the subject (or if they do, it’s not ranked highly in Google). Thus everyone is winding up at my rather short entry on accessibility improvements to google news, where I don’t really explain what ARIA is for, because I don’t really know. In an effort to satisfy the internets curiosity, I thought I’d take a minute to do some research on the subject.

According to wikipedia, Aria is really called WAI-ARIA, and:

WAI-ARIA is a set of documents that specify how to increase the accessibility of dynamic content
and user interface components developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript and related technologies.

That kind of rings some bells, for me. I vaguely remember reading something about it, somewhere. At the time, I think I just ignored it as yet another of the vague, academic, and impossible to follow pronouncements from The World Wide Web Consortium. The wikipedia article doesn’t help; it’s an awful text block of doomb with hardly any links to other wikipedia articles, and no headings or paragraphs. Before anyone says anything: no, I will not fix it. Wikipedia has a CAPTCHA, and I refuse to give any of my time or money to the organization until the wikipedia CAPTCHA has been completely removed. This particularly poor example of a Wikipedia article also fails to answer the all-important question: what does Aria do for *me*, the user?

An article from 2008 on the Google Reader Blog gives us a hint. Apparently, Google Reader also has ARIA support. The article says that it works with firefox3 and firevox or jaws 8. When using that software, after clicking the ARIA link, pressing questionmark will read out a list of hotkeys. I couldn’t get it to work at all with any version of jaws or firefox. However, it works as advertised in NVDA and firefox 3. It makes working with the extremely ajaxy google reader much easier; hotkeys can mark an article as read, jump from article to article, visit an article, subscribe and unsubscribe from feeds, and more.

But none of that has anything to do with Google News. However, after going to Google News, and selecting the ARIA enhanced link, pressing questionmark will read out a similar, if shorter, list of hotkeys. Unfortunately, when it comes to Google News, I just don’t see the point. I can already jump from story to story by pressing h, as each story now has a heading. I don’t need the special hotkeys that ARIA provides to do this. The other hotkeys in Google News are similarly unimpressive. But don’t take my word for it! Go to the ARIA enhanced google news with Firefox and NVDA, and see for yourself. All the functionality offered by ARIA can be done easier, and faster, with NVDA itself. While ARIA is useful for ajax websites like Google Reader, it’s of no use on Google News. And even in Google Reader, I’m still not sure why we need ARIA. Can’t we already assign hotkeys to things with the accesskey atribute? Many, many websites already do this. Perhaps, though, I’m missing something important. But on first blush, it doesn’t look all that revolutionary. The other advantage of using accesskey is that it doesn’t need a special version of the page, like ARIA seems to. Accesskey atributes can just be added into the original page, rather than building something entirely new.

The best way to conclude my thoughts on the matter is as follows: “meh.”

Accessibility Improvements To Google News

I just noticed this yesterday. I usually read Google News on my Nokia N82. It’s sort of like a morning paper. So it wasn’t until recently that I noticed the regular version of google news had gotten some recent accessibility enhancements. The most important is that each news story is now, finally, a heading. This means that screen reader users can jump from story to story with a single command, instead of cursoring down through all the story content. This makes things much, much quicker! The second is that an ARIA enhanced version of google news is now available. I’m not sure exactly what features this adds, as most screen readers don’t fully support ARIA, but it’s a good sign to see google continuing to adopt new and cutting edge accessibility technology.

Another Source For Described Movies Online

I’m a little late posting this, as I just looked into it today. The National Film Board of Canada has recently posted several described films online for free. They’re mostly nonfiction war films. But if that’s you’re thing, you’ll get a kick out of the collection. You can find the list of described films at this page on the national film board website.

Jaws 9: Jaws 8 With Bugfixes

Instead of updating the blog last night, I downloaded and installed Jaws 9.0 Public Beta 1. The good news: they finally fixed the blank pages problem! Now, whenever you load something in the browser, it never comes up blank. The bad news: other than some surface features, Jaws 9 is really just Jaws 8 with all the major bugs squeezed out. Shouldn’t this be jaws 8.5? At least it’s faster than jaws 8, and doesn’t give blank pages. If you haven’t yet, you should upgrade for those fixes alone.

IBM Works On Virtual World’s Accessibility

Some estimates predict that 80% of active internet users will be using a virtual world in four years’ time.

The company said that it is keen to ensure that blind people are not excluded from an environment that sighted people will take for granted.

Read more.

80%? I think that’s a case of huge overhyping. Sure, Second Life is touted as the all new thing, but honestly, I don’t know even one person who uses it. The IBM project isn’t even in Second life; instead, it’s in Active Worlds, a website that nobody has even heard of until now.

Story via Audyssey.

SJAMS Beta Download

As the official website seems to be under construction, and a lot of people have asked me for it, you can download SJAMS (the leading talking IRC solution for mIRC with Jaws for Windows, Window Eyes, and SAPI) from this link. Atmospheric rumblings have been heard about an update to the SJAMS codebase going under the name Bexirc, but I will neither confirm or deny anything at this point.