Describing system styles

[denise]

I've just filed bug 2124 as a medium-term goal to improve the journal customization process for people using screenreaders or people with low or no vision, to provide descriptions of each system style. This way, people with low/no vision will be able to have descriptions of each style read to them, allowing them to choose what they want their journal to look like to sighted visitors.

I'm the first to admit that I don't know what would be useful as opposed to what would be annoying, though, so I toss out the question: what would be useful? What would be annoying?

Text of bug behind cut tag for those who find Bugzilla hard to screenread:


Bug 2124 - Add 'style description' information to all system styles, display in /customize

A few weeks ago, Azz did a code tour that included describing the new system
styles and themes that were added, for the benefit of people who were using
screenreaders and/or who had partial vision but not complete. I've seen a few
people banter about the idea of extending that to a full system-wide thing, and
I really like the idea from an accessibility standpoint:

* Add a new S2 property, method, whatever, for "layout_description"

* Fill in the layout description for all current public styles, two or three
sentences that describe the appearance of the style. Mark did one in irc
tonight that I thought was really good (and made me remember to file this bug):
"Skittlish Dreams is a fairly typical blog layout -- a colored heading at the
top with the blog title and main links. The left side is about 75% of the page
and contains the entries. On the right in the remaining 25% is a sidebar
containing the user icon, calendar, popular tags, page summary box, etc. At
the very bottom of the page is a footer that just says 'powered by
Dreamwidth'."

* Indicate somehow, through a clickable link in the Customize area (like the
preview function for each layout is) or through some trick that makes
screenreaders read out the description when asked somehow, that there are
available descriptions for people who want them. I don't know about the best
practices here -- I'll post to dw_accessibility -- but the idea is to have it
available for screenreader users if they want it, and easy to get, but not read
by default. (Otherwise, reading through that page would be tedious and
annoying.)

Best practice going forward from there would then be to require each new theme
to have a layout description included, on the order of two/three sentences
explaining what it looks like with as value-judgement-free language as
possible, so people with minimal vision will be able to better contemplate what
they want their journals to look like to other people.

Comments

[not_a_sniglet]

Actually, the description of Skittlish that Mark gave me last night was very useful. That sort of information, also what colours are used in the layout.

Also I agree with lightjetsin Words like quirky and haphazard would be helpful too because mood is important.