what forms are inaccessible to you?

[deborah]

I was process of fixing an inaccessible form, and went to go swipe some CSS from another form -- and realized that other one also had accessibility problems. Whoops.

So now I'm on a mad dash to do some form accessibility remediation. It's a nice easy task which provides a big net win.

Tell me which forms you have accessibility problems with, and I will add them to my list.

The ones on my current list are the poll creator and the form to submit a support request.

At a minimum, tell me which form causes the problems, and I will play with it. Ideally, tell me

1. which form causes the problems
2. the nature of the problems
3. what browser and browser version you are using
4. what adaptive tech you are using, if any

Comments

[lightgetsin]

The friends filter thingum! I realize the longer term goal is to rebuild the entire interface, but since I don't think anyone's figured out how to do that yet, it can definitely be better than it is. I have struggled with it for a decade going back to LJ, so fill in basically every browser and version of Jaws we have lived through since then. The biggest issues are that the dropdowns inexplicably stop talking for no reason I can ever figure out. But only sometimes! I often have to enter forms mode, hit down arrow a couple of times, listen to the silence, then exit forms mode and change cursors to read what has been selected. And once I start moving people in and out of a filter, it gets even less reliable.

If you want me to play with anything and be more precise about what's happening, lmk.

[deborah]

Thanks so much, and I will totally ask you for more precision once I'm playing with it.

[jesse_the_k]

And the same form is inaccessible due to cognitive issues. Every time I use it I have to figure it out all over again. Off to dink around.

OK, first it took me 10 minutes just to find this form:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/editfilters

and now I remember my issue. This form works from the circle to the members. It starts with, say, "all the people I'll talk about sex with." Then it presents you with a list of all your friends. You then exclude the people you don't want to talk about sex with — the double negative is part of my confusion.

When I think about this feature, I'm focused on my members. I want to look at, say, lightgetsin and assign her to all the filters where I want her. Instead of having two lists with the items jumping back and forth, there would be one list with a ticky box.

(As far as location, there are more places to set options in DW than I can ever find. Sometimes I'll be able to find it the docs/FAQ, but not always. I'm intuiting no logic why the access filters, for example, are on a different page than the access/subscribe controls.)

While this page is great!
http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/subscriptions/filters
I don't have to figure out to use it at all. It is self-evident.

and

http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/
is fabulous: provides five options! tells you what they are!
Why can't all those pages have a "back to option central" link?

I feel embarrassed to say this, but I'm not dumb. I designed UIs and ran beta tests and all sorts of fancy la-de-da back in the day. It's just that my brain cells have taken a beating from a variety of directions, and I know this stuff could make more sense.

[deborah]

Thanks so much , this is awesome detail. And of course you shouldn't be embarassed! We should be; bad usability is our problem.

[cellio]

This may be specialized, but the comment form on kayre's journal has really teeny text, way smaller than what I'm seeing while typing this comment using the site style. An entry page says this about the style:

Base style:
[personal profile] timeasmymeasure
Theme:
[personal profile] rising

I'm using Firefox (21 currently), with a couple levels of text-only zoom. I don't have any DW-specific CSS overrides (Stylish).

[denise]

that's not really the kind of form deborah's talking about, but i took a look and i'm not reproducing; it looks fine to me in both journal style and site skin. can you take a screenshot, and list off all the extensions you're using?

[jeshyr]

Do we have any prototypically GOOD accessible forms that we can encourage folks to copy?

I just poked at one of the "Add ARIA to ___" bugs (bug 5107) with an eye to completing it but the idea of looking up 10,000 bits of ARIA to learn about it is daunting.

If there was something that I could copy and know it was DW Best Practice For Forms that'd be much more do-able... or alternatively a "do it this way" URL where somebody can learn which bits we're implementing? I just remember researching it once before and it was like that xkcd where you dive into Wikipedia and then come up 5 hours later with no idea what your original question even was...

[deborah]

Ha! D asked me to document this a couple of days ago, and I started it yesterday. I will work on finishing that today.