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This document is intended to help us plan out what UI changes would be made when adding certain features for accessibility.
The features being discussed here will help with UAAG compliance (see http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/) as well as augment our usability and accessibility in general.
| General Area | Problem | Proposal | UAAG Checkpoint |
|---|---|---|---|
| General Area | Problem | Proposal | UAAG Checkpoint |
| Image Blocking | Need good image blocking. Current implementation is buggy, UI doesn't serve accessibility well. | Recommend View -> Images as a checkbox menu item. The state global, and would be remembered from session to session. Pages would be redisplayed to reflect the current state. For accessibility purposes, image blocking on specific images isn't necessary, is it really important for security? If we end up with image prefs, they should not be under security -- under Appearance prefs. | |
| Image Animation | Image animation prefs should not be under security. | Recommend they go somewhere in Appearance prefs. | |
| Style Sheets | Options for viewing with different style sheets are undocumented. Currently the user must copy the files into their profile directory, which is hard to find. There is no UI for putting them where they want. | No current recommendation. Needs to be looked at. | |
| Popups | Need UI for cancelling popups that is acceptible to marketing requirements. | If we have an Accessibility prefs panel, it could go there. | |
| Text Zoom | Whenever a new window opens, it reverts back to normal (100%) viewing. Text Zoom is really useful for accessibility - it's much more useful than changing fonts, because it respects the author's original content choices. | Text Zoom should save state between sessions. New windows should use the saved text zoom value. | |
| Visited Links | Visited links just use a color change to differentiate them from unvisited links. | A checkbox pref that gives visited links a dotted underline would solve this problem. | 10.3 , 10.6 |
| Focus Appearance | Focus is difficult to see when show only with a dotted outline. | A checkbox pref "High Contrast Focus" that would show the focus with a colored background diffrent from that of the current page would be a good solution. | |
| General Area | Problem | Proposal | UAAG Checkpoint |
| Blinking Text | Need a way to turn off blink text in web pages. | A checkbox pref somewhere in Appearance Prefs. | |
| Timer Speed | Some users cannot keep up with rapidly occuring events based on the timer. | If possible, we need the ability to slow down or pause the timer. There could be a menu item for this or a pref. However, to make it really useful hotkeys should be hooked up. Speed up, slow down, stop. | |
| Image Link Appearance | Many pages turn off borders on images, hence images that are links are not apparent unless you watch the mouse pointer as you hover over the image. | A checkbox pref "Always show borders on images that are links?" | |
| Link/Form Tab Navigation | Tab goes through both links and form elements. This makes going through just form elements time consuming. Many users wish that tab only went between form elements. On Macintosh, the standard is that Tab goes only through form elements. IE implements this with a pref, where the pref is set to a different default on Mac. | Recommendation: a pref like IE has. An alternate set of keys, such as Ctrl+Up/Down would do the opposite of tab. That is, if tab navigates both links and forms, Ctrl+Up/Down navigates only through forms, and vice versa. | |
| Allow Special Content | There is a lot of different content that a user would generally
prefer not to load: background images, popups, applets, scripts,
redirects, refreshes, videos, audio, timed events, cookies, plugin
content. There is currently no way to prevent some of these types of content from being loaded. In addition, users who turn automatic loading of these types of contents should be able to receive an alert when that type of content is in the page, but wasn't loaded. The user would probably need to be able to select which held back content they want to load for a given page. |
Still looking for good recommendation. | |
| General Area | Problem | Proposal | UAAG Checkpoint |
| Control chrome disabling in popups |
Popups sometimes disable chrome features in windows that are
important for accessibility. For accessibility purposes, here are
things the user needs to be able to get to in any window:
|
bug 26353, bug 177838, bug 69099, bug 75158, bug 176304, bug 337344 | |
| One Handed Typing | One handed typists would heavily benefit from a single key overlay. | Opera and Lynx both have this. It requires a "leave forms" keystroke, so that typed keys don't become input in forms. This also makes very fast browsing with one hand on the keys and one on the mouse possible. | |
| Keyboard configurability | The UAAG asks for keyboard configurability, and many Mozilla users have asked for it as well. | Need to work on proposal. Difficult engineering task, because keys are not defined in 1 central location; some are hardcoded. | |
| Self documenting keyboard shortcuts | A lot of keyboard shortcuts aren't discoverable | Tooltips could show the current key assigned to a button. Visual Studio does this, as does IE if a pref is set. The tooltip would have to reflect the current configuration. | |
| Fast Link Navigation | Tabbing through links is slow and repetitive. |
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| Outline View | The UAAG asks for an outline view of content, which is potentially a very useful feature. Some users have a difficult time viewing content without setting off event handlers. Some users have a difficult finding what event handlers exist for content and setting them off (such as mouse events). | Need to work on proposal. |