accessibility grab bag: what do you wish were fixed?

[deborah]

I'm sitting down to work on bug 820, "Conform to WAI-ARIA guidelines throughout site" (two years after the bug was first opened, *hangs head in shame*). Don't worry if you don't know what WAI-ARIA is; suffice to say it's a technology that improves the accessibility of webpages.

The first thing I am going to do is focus on what needs we have that WAI-ARIA can meet.

To that end, I would love it if people took this as an opportunity to name their accessibility problems with dreamwidth, however small. I'm going to go back and look through the archives of this community, and I'm going to look at all the accessibility bugs in bugzilla, so don't feel you need to repeat things which have already been said. But don't worry about repeating accessibility concerns which have already been said, either; I have no problem with duplicates. Also, don't worry about only reporting accessibility issues you think WAI-ARIA can fix -- report everything, and I will figure out if WAI-ARIA can do anything to improve the user experience.

And hey, if it can't, maybe I will take other issues from this post, that don't come under WAI-ARIA, and create suggestions or new bugzilla bugs. Nothing goes to waste around here! :-)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

The access filter page, http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/editfilters , is generally horrible for whoever's using it. One of the accessibility workarounds that exists on LJ is, once the filter is created, apparently one can edit it in the admin console, but one has to use the [expletive redacted] page to create the filter in the first place. I don't know if one can still edit filters from the admin console here, nor if that's something Dreamwidth is interested in having as an option (versus building something that works for just about everybody).

It does not look like we inherited any of the hover-menu-only options from LJ.

[susanreads]

I'm pretty sure the reading filter creation/editing page is also bad for accessibility, similarly to the one azurelunatic was talking about. I don't know whether my issues with it count as access or "just" UI, but I'd love to be able to sort it by journal and see what filters they're in (to check that I didn't forget to put someone on a filter), instead of only seeing one filter at a time.

The other thing I've noticed is icons: I'd love to be able to read the description for an icon without going to the person's icons page and looking for the right one (when I can't tell what's going on/recognise characters/read the tiny text). The way I'd like it done might be in conflict with accessibility guidelines, though. This version of Firefox (3.6.13) uses a different way of showing image info from version 2, and doesn't seem to include the alt text, so I'd like the alt text and the title to be the same, but I'm sure this has come up in dw_suggestions and we couldn't find a solution that would work for everybody.

Nice of you to ask!

[auronlu]

I've got 20-60 vision, uncorrectable.

My problem is that the font while reading posts or writing replies is critically larger than that for composing/editing posts.

As a result, I have to boost my browser's font size to compose/edit my posts, then shrink it to read posts which have spilled off the screen.

I'm on OSX, see the same problem in both Chrome and Firefox. The font I'm seeing here looks like Courier 14(?) point, and I've left all font settings as-is on my journal. I think the font I'm seeing in the post editor may be Arial 10 pt.