dynamically generated accessible footnotes

[deborah]

I've been thinking for a little while about making a DW suggestion about putting in something that makes it easy for people to generate accessible hyperlinked footnotes in their posts. This week, somebody ran this little script to generate dynamic footnotes by the WebAIM mailing list.

I was hoping that people here could give it a try and see what they think. It's a really neat little tool. It requires JavaScript not be disabled, and possibly might require newer versions of JAWS (because it uses WAI-ARIA), but basically it makes it so that creating only a tiny little snippet of code, you can get footnotes that, in a keyboard and screen reader accessible fashion, allow you to jump back and forth between the footnote in the cited reference. He also added a configurable hotkey so that screenreaders could announce the footnote text without changing the page focus. (I tested that with in NVDA, and it worked splendidly.)

What do people think of it?

Demo of dynamic footnotes

Comments

[denise]

This is *awesome*.

[jeshyr]

That looks very handy! I often use footnotes and I never hyperlink them because it's too much trouble to do it by hand.... great idea :)

[fu]

Following up on this! SHould we file a bug?

[jeshyr]

I suspect we need to find a good way of formatting footnotes in text before we can implement it - that's not built into the script above at all.

I usually do them by hand without links like this[1] but I know other people use different formats. The only markup I can think of with footnotes built in is Wikiformatting which does it with weird pseudo-HTML that I find quite confusing because it seems like it's inline when you write it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes

I think it might be a think to take to suggestions or -dev for brainstorming before we do it?


r

[1] Example footnote

[deborah]

wait, I'm confused. When I look at the demo page, I see the footnote indicators formatted via JavaScript with superscripted numbers.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

The limitation I see on this is that there's no way to do it in rich text, unless we have a lot of control over our rich text editor.

[jeshyr]

If you look at the demo script it has the footnote text inside the script itself - we need to figure out how to feed the info to the script I think?

[deborah]

Whoa, yeah, it does. How totally bizarre. I'm gonna write to them and ask how they thought this would ever be expected to work in the wild!

[denise]

we do have 100% control over our RTE. it's just ... kind of crap :P