suggestion for style documentation

[jadelennox]

I'm curious as to whether or not I am the only person who ends up having accessibility issues when people modify their styles to change the text of basic features. Specifically:

1. It's bad enough when the text goes back and forth between two different standards (e.g. "user info" versus "profile").
2. It's worse when the text is something the style designer came up with to be original but which still carries clear meaning (e.g. "about me").
3. It's extremely difficult when the text is all flavor and doesn't convey much meaning (e.g. "happy tracks in the sand").

Am I the only person for whom this is an accessibility issue? If this is a general issue and not just me, perhaps we could write some documentation and propose it to the style team as guidelines for what kind of textual changes are worth avoiding if you really care about accessibility in your style. Since end-users can change those texts, not just style designers, we could come up with something brief and nonintimidating for the customization pages.

(By the way, I know I was working on a couple of open accessibility tickets, and I vanished for several months due to personal issues. I'm back as of this week, and have started looking at those tickets again. Sorry for the vanishing.)

Comments

[amadi]

Isn't this the sort of issue where style=mine comes into play? I'm not sure how you can non-intimidatingly suggest to people that they shouldn't customize their own space because someone might have difficulty understanding their personalization choices.

I think this is also where titles on the standard links needs to be brought into play. Every system generated link, everywhere, needs to use the title attribute.

[jackandahat]

I feel this gets into arguments of how far a person should go to accomodate other people - who they might well not have invited into their space.

In a community, where many people can reasonable expect to be accomodated, then it's a fair enough point - it should be accessible to all members. But a personal journal is personal. I understand it's not private unless it's locked, but it is that person's space.

For example - I swear. A lot. In a community like this, I'm not going to because I don't know the audience. In my journal, I'm going to swear as much as I feel necessary because it's my space, and people who are there know what to expect. I wouldn't expect someone to come in uninvited and say "Modify your language because I want to read this."

[aveleh]

You're not the only one!

Official styles will always have consistent text, so that hopefully helps to some degree.

I am mostly just waiting on http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168 to solve all my browsing problems :)

[jesse_the_k]

Reading this entry has helped me understand why it's an accessibility issue for me because of cognitive impairments: I can't always decode the user-specified choices. (And proof that insight is patch: I used to sue "re:me" instead of "profile," but have changed it right now.)

[zvi]

I don't understand how this is an accessibility issue, as opposed to a "poor communicators communicate poorly" issue. Could you explain more, or tell me what I need to read up on to get it?

[aveleh]

Oh, and I also very much like the idea of having a page or document or something, somewhere, that gives a list of ways and reasons to design for accessibility. With some sort of header about how while the list is all good things to consider, even just picking a few to fix will make a design more accessible to more people. I bet the wiki's a good place to start?

[afuna]

Belatedly, but some guidelines as to whether navigation, etc, (Recent Entries, Profile, etc links) may be placed before the main content would also be good.

I am looking into it, jumping of from the links to WebAIM in one of your other entries and it looks like some people are against, some people are for? I'm trying to gauge whether it would be a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing for some styles to have navigation links or other content in between the header and entries content, and the feedback I've seen makes me lean towards: as much as possible, no, but some may find it useful.

[afuna]

Hm, do you know if having two sets of standardized text (a long form and a short form) would pose the same problems?

The properties in question are the entry management links, like so:

"Previous Entry" => "Previous"
"Next Entry" => "Next"
"Add to Memories" => "Memory"
"Track This" => "Track"
"Untrack This" => "Untrack"
"Tell Someone" => "Tell"
"Leave a comment" => "Comment"

In all cases, the first is the one currently used by all layouts; the second is one we're considering as a second set to allow layouts to use, if they need more space in the footer bar.

(And if you think this should be a top-level entry, I can do that as well)