"Manage Filters" Page - Accessibility Workaround/Notes

[jeshyr]

The current "Manage Filters" page sucks. It sucks for sighted people, people with low vision, people with mouse use issues, and especially for screen reader users. So basically it sucks for everybody in terms of usability and accessibility!

Be reassured: Now that the "Manage Circle" page is relatively accessible it's next on our "hit list" of sucky Dreamwidth accessibility spots. But in the mean time rahaeli pointed out to me there's a workaround for those who find the Manage Filters page to be a big problem.

1. Open your Manage Filters page and use the "New" button to create all the filters you want to create.

2. Go to the profile page of anybody who you want to put onto a filter or take of a filter, and follow the link named "Grant Access" or "Modify Access". This will take you to a page which, among other things, lists all your filters with individual check boxes where you can specify which filters the person should be in.

3. Repeat for everybody that you want to include in a filter - by default a new created filter includes nobody so each person you want to include needs to be done.

Yes, this is a crappy hack of a workaround and nobody thinks it's a long term solution, but it's better than nothing for now.

Do you have ideas as to how the Manage Filters page could be arranged so it's usable by both sighted and blind users and everybody else too? Leave suggestions in comments please!

Comments

[lightgetsin]

I've been thinking about this for a while. I think the most important feature to keep about the manage filters page is the ability to easily see who's in and who's out of a filter. I say this because my immediate suggestion of how to fix it is to integrate it into the manage circle page. Say you check "grant access" for someone, and your list of filters automatically opens up right next to that user, and you can check each box you want to add them to. This would solve the bulk editing problem, but it wouldn't really fix the display problem because you do need to see a discrete list of everyone total in a filter.

Here's my other question: are we going to separate the concept of reading filters from posting filters? Do we need to? I can see it both ways. It would be really nice for one thing if a "reading filter" wasn't as much of a pain as it is on lj, where you have to take somebody off defaultview and then put them on whatever not default filter you want them on, or else they're permanently invisible to you and you forget all about them. That is, it would be nice if reading filters were more intuitively useful for reading lists as opposed to security, so if you take someone off defaultview, they automatically go into a big not default reading filter that you can jigger with if you want.

...off topic. Anyway. From my standpoint, the main access issue with manage filters is that those dynamically changing listboxes crash my software like whoa. Make them go away, plz. Oh, and the existing buttons are not marked clearly -- an arrow is really not enough, considering a lot of screenreader users turn off punctuation announcements. So to me, it just says "button."

[snakeling]

the existing buttons are not marked clearly
As an immediate, take-two-seconds-to-fix solution, changing the arrow buttons to "Add" and "Remove" would be a good idea. Not nearly enough, of course, though.

Personally, I'm for keeping the Access and Reading filters separated, if only because you can quickly get a big list when they're mixed up, and then you don't remember which one's supposed to be a reading filter and which one an access filter.

While we're redesigning the thing, a list with all the people not in a filter would be awesome, too.