Screen reader survey

Thanks for that Gary. Extremely useful.

For the surprising results, do you mean a significant number want to see alt text for mood images?
I wonder what this means for background images. I try to make decorative (as opposed to informative or contextual) images backgrounds as much as possible.

I can't imagine why frame are considered so highly in this poll. I just can't fathom the reasoning. Maybe because it gets the navigation out of the way and you don't have to "skip to".

Chris, I'm thinking of stuff like a day care center whose page has graphics or photos of children at play and study; stuff that is not required of the content, but does set the tone for the business. Very often, these are intertwined with the content, and are not background. We've been led toward setting alt="", so as not to distract.

The other point on content images seemed to me to be that photos should be labeled as such. For example, our illustrious leader's portrait accompanies his bio; the alt value would be "photo of our pointy haired boss", rather than "pointy haired boss".

These are contra previous advice, but when seen in the context of the survey, make sense.

cheers,

gary

It's not that frames are highly desirable, but rather they are easy to deal with. We have been told time and again that frames made it more difficult for folks using assistive technology. Apparently that is not overly true.

I don't think I'll run out and throw a bunch of (i)frames into pages willy-nilly, but I won't worry so much about needing the iframe for one thing or another.

cheers,

gary

I wish they'd give a bit more information on that. I'd like to know if those that chose it as "easy to use" were speaking about iframe or a fully framed site.

But if there's a caption that says "pointy haired boss" under the photo or the photo is adjacent to a heading that says the same, I'd think the best option would be to leave alt blank.

I find the lack of detail on this to be frustrating and would rather not read something that admits to not having been exacting in it's questioning.

Are we talking Iframes or full frames, what exactly do the users find easier about this.

I think browsers have improved in how they handle frames. As I recall the two biggest gripes were, back button difficulties and no updating of the URL. Back button issues are almost non-existent now (at least in Firefox). I suspect most users don't care two hoots about the URL except when they bookmark a page.

I think give them a break. Its the first survey. They can now use the results to identify areas to examine more closely in the next survey.

ever the voice of reason, it still wouldn't have hurt - especially on this type of issue - to have extracted a little clarification. Frames of either flavour are deprecated under the schemas most of write to so it's of interest.

I remember the first time I went through a framed page in JAWS. What was most disorienting was that I couldn't SEE where I was (a blind person regularly using a screen reader doesn't do this). It was ok after I figured out where I was, but for the exercise I was doing I didn't have to jump in and out of the frames-- it was an older banking site so the goal was pretty much to go straight through it. Of course I also did it in IE6 because I'm familiar with the IE JAWS commands not the Firefox ones, and IE doesn't have :focus : )

For a while now I've been setting in my alt text what the image is, if I thought it mattered (if it was a photo, painting, sculpture, drawing, 3d computer art, animation). So now I really want to know why everyone wanted "photo" specifically. Why did it matter to them? What did it tell them that "White House" didn't? Assuming everyone's hearing "graphic" before it (I dunno what Window-Eyes or the others do, only JAWS).

Lawlz.

I didn't know the results would come out so soon! I'm spreading this around!

I thought the "Skip" Links was very interesting. I thought they all would prefer them. Same thoughts go out to the Text-only versions. Great survey, thanks gary!

I swear I saw somewhere that the more proficient users turned off reading the element name. I can't find it now. :shrug:

In that case, the alt text would simply read as text without the "image" or "graphic" preceding it, right? Makes sense to me.

cheers,

gary

This question of skips links arose in a very loose survey a fair while back, can't remember the site but it was one of the well known bloggers,(might have been berea st)
and users then actually leant towards a preference for no skip links or at least they professed to being quite happy to follow the normal flow of a well thought out document and that skip links weren't that necessary or useful to them. To some degree skip links seem to have been one of those things that people have latched on to as a useful means of highlighting the effort to provide for certain users. As far as I'm aware there has never been a particular request for them.

Even if I'm checking a page out in Lynx, I usually want to go through the whole page first so I don't miss stuff. But if they've got a mile-long navigation menu then after a page or two of that, I want to be able to skip it (and end up reliably in the same place). I'm thinking people who don't feel the need for them are header-jumpers... and people aware enough to add skip links would also be more aware of using proper semantic headers.

A page with a short, clear-cut navigation menu and a logical-flow setup prolly doesn't need them... but I'll add them in anyway, cause you know, you don't HAVE to click on them if you don't want to. It's another door in the hallway you can pass without opening.

Gary, I would think JAWS would let you turn off names of elements, but I find it useful (well, after the first link and I'm in a menu, it gets tedious and JAWS doesn't stop after saying "link" but runs it all through like one big Stephen Hawking line). I'd still like to know what's so special about photo, though thinking about it last night, I wondered if it was a consequence of many pages having decorative images in the HTML, where photos are usually actually part of the content.
??

yes poes that is the view I take on using them, however I was simply saying that in a world where there have been few studies on accessibility / usability that was one I came across a while back and it was interesting in the fact that skip links were deemed not to be that critical.

As for turning off element name reading if that is done then adding 'photo' does break the text flow and point out that an image is being described rather than continuing text which may then not make a great deal of sense, think about it!

I would hope that on any page of mine, they're not critical : )

stop bringing things around to yourself!

I realize this is not exactly a timely response, but just now had reason to revisit this thread.

I don't think it's really about photos so much as describing the source medium of the image. The photo is what was asked about, so the results centered on photos. That does likely represent the major medium for contextual images. Consider also the phrases "drawing of", "graph of", or "screencap of".

cheers,

gary

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