Some initial thoughts

Here are some initial thoughts.

*I am interested in making the site work better for disabled people. We are not going to be "fully accessible" in the near future, however. This is about better, not best.
*Running such a large site with so few people is a real challenge. We don't have much time or money. We have to keep the site alive, and the company alive. This means need to find the greatest wins with the least effort. I suspect there are some very simple things we could do. Let's do them.
*When I worked for Houghton Mifflin (3 years ago?), I had to pay attention to the (often incomprehensible) accessibility guidelines of the state departments of education in the fifty states. It made my cynical about acessibility. Also, my knowledge is three years out of data now. So, I'm going to need education.
*We should think outside of the box, about what would be good not only what is "compliant." For example, although I know LibraryThing has accessibility problems, I did make it a priority to get the National Library for the Blind as a source. Are we mining all that data well? Are there soures we should be linking to? Is there metadata that would help the disabled community particularly?
*Tim gets cranky. I am strongly fatigued by the assertion that accessibility is just about following web standards, and why doesn't LibraryThing follow web standards? I have no interest in a religious discussion about web standards, and will actually leave if this devolves into one. But I would note that if you run the Jupiter 100 through a standards checker you will get less than 10% compliance. Standards are a religion to some. I prefer my religion to be an actual religion.

The biggest thing for me is being able to use 800x600 screen resolution. LibraryThing does some wonky things like overlapping the navigation tabs and columns. It's accessible, don't get me wrong, just wonky sometimes.

You know, Tim, something happened today that made me think about this. I posted a suggestion that the Author Page indicate which books had reviews, and it was pointed out to me that this already existed. I had missed it! The grey type is so faint and tiny that it went right past me, even though I have relatively decent vision (just reading glasses, thanks).

Someone made a comment on the thread that "LT staff are excessively fond of tiny gray writing."

What I think is that you are trying to make that sort of thing visible, but not obtrusive. Yet if I, with the aforesaid relatively decent vision, missed it, how much harder for someone whose vision is not so good?

So perhaps larger type for such things? Or a bold font?

Ha. That's me. I like the gray writing. I stand convicted.

That's ok. I still can't see those gray stars unless I highlight the page. :-)

(Edited to add: Or change my monitor setting so that everything other than LT looks strange.)

Btw, the gray edit pencil & delete X for this post are clearly visible.

With regards to the gray type, would it be a bang-for-the-buck to offer an alternate CSS? With bigger type sizes, grays become black, etc. Selectable from each user's profile preferences.
No extra load on the servers (good), some CSS work, could be up to twice the testing time for features (bad).

Easier to just use just to use a darker shade of gray?

Edit: Aauugh. I split the infinitive. Now I get to test strike out.

myshelves> You're absolutely right. My apologies for not explaining my idea in greater detail or if I'm long-winded here.

CSS can be a part of web pages, it controls the characteristics of font display, for example: size, color and emphasis. It also controls page layout such as the navigation menu on the left and the and these posts in the center. It also controls how the page is presented to the user via a media tag. For example, media=screenreader (I don't have any reference books with me so the syntax is wrong) would read the screen to the user, in a specified order, that might be different from how the page is presented in a browser. This allows a web page to get away from markup such as 'bold', instead using 'emphasis' (or 'strong'). Emphasis would appear in a browser just like bold, but with a screen reader it could be pronounced with greater volume. This allows the page markup to describe the semantic content, rather than just marking the text.

Additionally, CSS is in a separate file than the page text and can be fairly easily swapped out through programming. See CSS Zen Garden for examples of switching the CSS with the same content.

My thought was that the accessibility issues which don't affect other users, be fixed in an alternate CSS file.

I guess so. I'm afraid that most of that is over my head.

A problem might be that if people can't see something, they won't know that they need to switch in order to see it. IYSWIM. :-)

What disabilities are most affected? off the top of my head:

Visual impairment: hence large fonts, clear contrast, compatability with text to speech devices?

Aural impairment: - no problems here at all?

mobility impairment: size of links? some of the links require quite specific clicks in a small area?

mental impairment: LT is not as intuative to use as it could be - there are lots of posts asking what something is / does / works and how to use it, and these are presumably unimpaired thinkers. More help text, easily searchable FAQs ???

Just a couple of thoughts.

I think that low vision can MOSTLY be corrected by tweaking your browser. (Some browsers override explicit pixel settings, and I would suspect that low-vision users have them.) But blind users have all sorts of problems—frames, Ajaxing in, images without alts, no "skip navigation" links, etc. I'm game to hear where the problems are.

T

Mobility impairments, like visual impairments, can require full screen reader accessibility. I use a combination of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and keyboard shortcuts out the wazoo to navigate.

Alternate CSS is definitely helpful for a lot of people with visual and mental disabilities (and for anyone who wants to print pages, as well). A very plain, basic straightforward layout without anything pretty and nothing but content and structural tags is very useful for people using screen readers or people who have comprehension difficulties. (Tim, I think that's what people are often talking about when they wax rhapsodic about "web standards". I agree with you that most of the legal standards are complex or impossible to implement fully. But if the HTML is logically laid out without design elements in HTML, and styled entirely with CSS, then it is much more accessible. For that matter, at that point you barely need alternate CSS -- most users with disabilities are probably used to turning off author mode style sheets and seeing the blank HTML, or seeing the HTML with their own style sheets designed for low vision, or we have software that can cope with excessive design as long as it is in CSS and not in the HTML.)

I'm trying to think of the elements of the tool which have been inaccessible for me in particular. Lots of the Ajax dynamic coding is well enough done that I can work around it, such as the hidden-until- clicked-upon box which reveals options such as "change cover art". (Firefox mouseless browsing knows the links are going to be there and so provides them with hidden numbers which I can extrapolate from the numbered links already displayed.)

But the page to select cover images is completely inaccessible. That one requires mouse driving. Also, rating books requires a mouse.

(At some point about six months ago things got a lot better in terms of accessibility. Before that, some of the links in the navigation frames were completely inaccessible.)

The point about CSS is well taken. Generally I find that argument is made against sites with font tags and so forth. We use lots of semantic markup and CSS. But we also use tables, and that's not going to change.

> But the page to select cover images is completely inaccessible.
To be clear, you mean the page to add or change cover images on a book of yours, right?

> Rating books
If it just the lack of an alt image, or is onclick inherently impossible with today's screen readers.

what grey writing? i've never seen it anywhere? unless you mean such as in the explanation of touchstones next to this message. well, i just don't read grey writing. I figure it is not important and dismiss it.

As for accessibility, I hit the 8 to 12 year old site just started and there is tim's message that some federal act forbids them participating in LT. My intention was to congratulate them on being readers; that their participation has made me happier in this world. Like many oldsters, I believe that from generation X on down those who actively read books are dwindling to a proverbial null.

any info on this? how can we include them without violating such a law? Tell them to lie about their age? After all, we all do it sooner or later. By the way, I am 39 years old and have been for the last quarter-century!

14: Why not provide a number by each cover, so people could select by number?

15: US decided it was illegal, so twould be hard to do. Tim posted a bit about a possible mechanism in another thread.