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.

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.

Cuil: What Is The Point?

Apparently, a web robot calling itself Twiceler has, for reasons known only to itself, been visiting my tiny little corner of cyberspace several times an hour. It doesn’t really matter to me, I have the bandwidth to spare, and Dreamhost hasn’t started complaining yet, but I was kind of wondering, while sitting waiting for my next class to start, what the purpose of all these visits is.

After clicking a few links, I discovered that my friend Twiceler works for a brand new startup search engine called Cuil. According to the website:

…Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone
else–three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft…Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Wow! This sounds impressive! It could even, perhaps, be a google killer! As a journalist, though, I have to evaluate this for myself. Is Cuil really as wonderful as it says?

According to my traffic logs, Cuil must have indexed most of my recent posts, at least. I mean, it has visited 123 times in the last 2 days. So I have some perfect data to test Cuil on for accuracy. Let’s start by trying to find out information about the Victor ReaderStream birthday party coming up on Saturday. I posted about this a while ago, so surely it’s indexed. A search on cuil for victor stream birthday not only returns no results about the online party, it doesn’t even have anything about the Victor Reader! The exact same search on google, however, has an advertisement for the Victor product, the ACB birthday party from last year, and the birthday party we’re discussing this year, all on the front page! It’d be hard to do better than that, unless they linked to the Humanware press release directly from the Humanware website, rather than the version I posted.

But maybe that was too difficult for Cuil. Maybe it’s just not good with recent events; it probably takes several months to do all that website analyzing they keep going on about. Let’s try a search for a tiny internet radio network that’s been around for three years now, called The Beyond Radio Network, and see what information we can find. A search for the beyond radio network on Cuil does find the tbrn.net homepage as the first link. However, of the rest of that first page, over half of the links lead to 404 pages! What on earth? Let me repeat that. Half of the links on the first page of results go to 404 pages! How long has it been since Google sent you to a 404 page? It never happens! Not even when searching for the beyond radio network.

I just have no words. A search engine that sends people to 404 pages, and can’t present the right information for even the most narrow search, is visiting my blog several times daily. Why? I’m starting to suspect that the more often a search engine visits my blog, the worse it is. I mean, I’m also amused to note that, according to statpress, 100% of all search traffic to my blog comes from Windows Live Search. Windows Live Search? What the heck?

Ontario Election in Two Weeks: Are You Ready?

Still don’t know how you’re going to vote in the Ontario Election? Well, elections are getting closer and closer every day! Maybe it’s time to start thinking about it. Here are some links to help you out.

Find Your Electoral District: Knowing where to vote, and who your candidates are, really helps. Elections Ontario has lots of other useful information, too.

New Democratic Party Of Ontario: The website of the NDP. The right choice, in my opinion.

The Ontario Liberal Party: The website of the Liberals. Not a bad choice, especially if you like the “I told you so” feeling of voting for the winning party.

Ontario PC: The homepage of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. A much, much worse choice.

Green Party of Ontario: The “official website”. Well, it’s better than voting PC. An excelent choice if you’re a flake, hippy, or university student.

Family Coalition Party: The home page of the FCP, the official Christian fundamentalist party. Don’t worry, they’re harmless; they never get any seats.

BigDecision.ca: You didn’t forget about our _big decision_ did you? This site has the info.

Change The System: And this website has the opinions and idealism.

Vote for MMP: They want to change it all.

No MMP: No! Bad dog! Bad idea!

Did I miss a website? Post it in the comments! Disagree with me? You’re wrong, but you can feel free to go ahead and show everyone just how wrong you are by making a comment, anyway.