Re: Update request: Notes

[FX]

Thanks Chas,

Your suggested changes would be fairly straight forward edits to a couple of Freemarker templates.  I'll ask the graphic designer who's working with the Oregon Commission for the Blind whether such changes would improve our pages screen-reader wise.

From: Chas_Belov_SFMTA <charle...@sfmta.com>

Date: May 16, 2008 12:11:10 PM PDT

To: Frank Purcell <fxpu...@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: Update request: Notes

On Mar 13, 7:15 pm, "Frank Purcell" <fxpurc...@gmail.com> wrote:

For example, we've started to produce and make public horizontal timetables

for the first time (the idea being that this format would work better in a

screen reader for viz impaired --http://trimet.org/schedules/w/t1100_0.html).

With that layout, for trip based events, I found that I needed to mark *all

the stops* in a given trip with the footnote symbol, since a footnote on

just the first stop would not be seen (or heard) when looking at times for

another stop (eg: a lower row in this orientation), since reading

left-to-right, they'd be no footnote otherwise.

One issue I see is that any given footnote link goes to the list of
all footnotes, so that a screen reader would potentially read aloud
all the footnotes before getting to the relevant one. In theory, one
could provide a direct anchor to each individual footnote.

Another challenge for screen readers is that a link to "link w" could
go by awfully quickly. One option would be to put the footnote text in
a title attribute on the link. Then the screen reader would read aloud
the footnote without having to follow the link. In addition, sighted
visitors could hover the cursor over the link and read the footnote
text without having to follow the link.

Potential downsides of this would be increased page weight, and a
frequently repeated footnote being read aloud in full over and over
again.

Hope this helps,
Charles "Chas" Belov
SFMTA Webmaster
www.sfmta.com/webmaster