[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: New properties for StatusNotifierItem: Accessible Label (1/3)]]

Sebastian Kügler sebas at kde.org
Thu Feb 10 18:22:17 CET 2011


On Thursday, February 10, 2011 05:39:08 Ted Gould wrote:
>   Plasma folks,
> 
> I forwarded the discussion that was had about using the title in the
> tooltip for the accessible label.  While I felt that it was not adequate
> I couldn't express why.  As per usual, mpt says it better than I, here
> is his response:
> 
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com>
> 
> Not enough information to check signature validity.  Show Details
> 
>   Ted Gould wrote on 08/02/11 20:23:
> >...
> >
> > Do you have thoughts on this from the a11y perspective?  They want to
> > use the title of the tooltip for the accessible label.  It seems to me
> > that would be sub-optimal, but if so I need a good reason :)

I understand that it's suboptimal (though thanks, Matthew for laying it out in 
greater detail), my reservation was that many developers simply don't care 
about accessibility enough to add another string, so it probable makes sense 
if the accessible label falls back to the tooltip when the developer forgot to 
specify the accessible label.

> 
> 1.  Expert screenreader users will, if they can, save time by listening
>     to only the first part of an item's label before navigating
>     elsewhere. So an accessible label may put variable information
>     first (for example, "22 percent battery"), while the tooltip may be
>     better presenting the same information in key-value form (for
>     example, "Battery (22%)").
> 
> 2.  A smart human reading something aloud will often expand
>     abbreviations. A screenreader often won't understand the context
>     well enough to do this, so an accessible label may pre-expand
>     abbreviations instead. For example, whereas a tooltip may compactly
>     say "Battery (4:05 remaining)", an accessible label might better
>     say "4 hours 5 minutes battery remaining". (Luke may want to
>     correct me on this.)
> 
> 3.  Some things that need to be conveyed in accessible labels would be
>     utterly redundant in tooltips. For example, something like Ubuntu's
>     session menu needs an accessible label "Session" to briefly
>     identify it. But if we were giving our menus tooltips, "Session"
>     would be rather useless; a better tooltip would be something like
>     "Commands for exiting Ubuntu".
> 
> >                                                               Any
> >
> > examples anywhere I could point to?
> >
> >...
> 
> Images in HTML. After a long struggle, accessibility advocates finally
> got most browsers to treat alt= (the accessible equivalent) and title=
> (the tooltip) differently, to help Web authors understand that what's
> good for one is rarely good for the other.

Exactly, and how many websites end up with this distinction correctly 
implemented?

Anyway, I don't have any objections, just the above reservation and possible 
workaround.
-- 
sebas

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