[Xerte] Re: Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

Fri May 3 12:38:13 BST 2013

Ok, I'll let you know what I find out next week.

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Alistair McNaught
Sent: 03 May 2013 12:35
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

Ooops - cross cutting threads - sorry, my fault.

Julian, Fay,

Maybe we should park this a week until Fay has looked at ARIA because it's all a matter of navigational SCALES as far as I can see...

Whole LO - If H1 and H2 are providing a non sighted user with an instant overview of object-wide navigation we want to keep them UNLESS aria landscape markup does it better.

Within a page - Aria landmarks might provide a good navigation within individual LO pages but we don't know how easy they'll be to implement yet.

Within a text block - Having a way of navigating longish text in the body of a page via a heading tag is an important accessibility feature and we should have it if we can BUT

... whether the menu context tag is h1, h2 or h3 might depend on whether or not ARIA replaces h1 and h2 in current object-wide navigation.

Lets see what Fay finds out about ARIA and that will then help us know whether a menu based tag would be at level 1,2 or 3.
It's an exciting conversation from an accessibility standpoint but can we continue it when Fay's had a look at ARIA landscape markup?

Alistair

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Fay Cross
Sent: 03 May 2013 12:03
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

I can easily remove the h1 and h2 that are used on the interface.  What's best for accessibility?  To have the main titles marked up like this or just using headings in the page contents (disregarding for the moment the fact that people may add h1/2 to the page content manually)?

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Alistair McNaught
Sent: 03 May 2013 11:57
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

> By the way, I've used H1 & H2 for the project title and page title so where ever I've added extra headings in the page contents I've only used H3 onwards

That's well worth knowing and lends strength to the argument for having a single heading level (H3) available in the right click context menu to avoid people trying to be more accessible and accidentally being more confusing!

I'd be very interested to see how the aria landmarks might work on a page level to help a blind user imagine the purpose and design of the page layout more effectively.

Alistair

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Fay Cross
Sent: 02 May 2013 15:40
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

Hi Alistair

I'll look in to Aria Landmarks and try adding them to define the main interface sections next week (I realise I've been saying for some time that I'll look in to it but it's now in my calendar so I won't forget :) ).

By the way, I've used H1 & H2 for the project title and page title so where ever I've added extra headings in the page contents I've only used H3 onwards.  If an author manually adds H1/2 in the wizard the wizard then the structure might become a bit confusing.

Fay

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Alistair McNaught
Sent: 02 May 2013 15:10
To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Xerte] Playing around with XerteToolkits - heading levels on right click menu?

If you've been listening to any TechDis mantra over recent years you'll realise that adding heading levels to documents is really important for accessibility for all sorts of reasons, but especially for blind people.

Yesterday I was working with some publishing colleagues on accessibility guidance for publishers and we were playing with toolkits to see how much html we could add in the editor and have it carry through to the html5 output. I was excited to find we could embed heading levels, tables and even inline styling - (for colour coding ONIX accessibility metadata if you really want to know!).

Of all these things the most genuinely useful for non-technical users would be to have a rightclick option in the editor to be able to apply a heading level in the same way it currently applies bold, italic and hyperlinking etc.

Could Aria Landmarks be added in a similar way? Or can they be built in automatically (since most page types have clearly identifiable areas that relate to Aria definitions like
main: Main content in a document.
complementary: Any section of the document that supports but is separable from the main content, but is meaningful on its own even when separated from it. (Nested pages?)
form: A region of the document that represents a collection of form-associated elements, some of which can represent editable values that can be submitted to a server for processing. (Gap fill and hangman?)
navigation: A collection of links suitable for use when navigating the document or related documents.

More questions than answers but you have to realise the flack I get from accessibility militants that Toolkits "doesn't do semantic structure" etc. Now that I've realised it CAN I'd love to be able to find away of making it easy for non coders to do it.

How feasible is tweaking of the right click Editor menu? How long would it take? Where in the scale of costs or favours does this lie? A pint at the local? a meal at the Indian restaurant? A day out at Thorpe Park or a new house?

Alistair

Alistair McNaught
Senior Advisor
JISC TechDis Service
Higher Education Academy | Innovation Way | York | YO10 5BR
Mobile - +44 (0)7870567659
Skype - alistair_techdis
Twitter - @alistairm
Web - www.jisctechdis.ac.uk<http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/> | www.scoop.it/t/inclusive-teaching-and-learning<http://www.scoop.it/t/inclusive-teaching-and-learning>

This email is confidential and may be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient please accept our apologies. Please do not disclose, copy, or distribute information in this email nor take any action in reliance on its contents: to do so is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. Please inform us that this message has gone astray before deleting it. Please note that views expressed in this email are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Higher Education Academy. Please note that this e-mail has been created in the knowledge that Internet e-mail is not a secure communications medium. We advise that you understand and observe this lack of security when e-mailing us. Although we have taken steps to ensure this e-mail and attachments are free from any virus, we advise that in keeping with good computing practice the recipient should ensure they are actually virus free. The Higher Education Academy Registered No 4930131

This email is confidential and may be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient please accept our apologies. Please do not disclose, copy, or distribute information in this email nor take any action in reliance on its contents: to do so is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. Please inform us that this message has gone astray before deleting it. Please note that views expressed in this email are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Higher Education Academy. Please note that this e-mail has been created in the knowledge that Internet e-mail is not a secure communications medium. We advise that you understand and observe this lack of security when e-mailing us. Although we have taken steps to ensure this e-mail and attachments are free from any virus, we advise that in keeping with good computing practice the recipient should ensure they are actually virus free. The Higher Education Academy Registered No 4930131
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/pipermail/xerte/attachments/20130503/9833b877/attachment-0001.html>