Accessibility for Interactives

[William Haynes]

PreTeXt supports <description>  tags to to provide descriptive text for <image>s.   Is anything similar available or planned for interactive elements like geogebra diagrams?    

I"d rather not use figure captions for this purpose since a good description rarely makes a good caption, and some of my interactives are not wrapped in figures.

Will

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Will,

Yes, I think such an addition makes sense. It'll be useful for what we leave
behind in a translation to braille.

The use of "alt-text" and descriptions is in a bit of flux right now. See

https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/issues/1762

I've added a note there.

We'll have to think about just where we place this in the HTML, maybe on an
"iframe" they all have? I haven't thought this through yet.

So, given that "interactive" still need some work to be official (in-progress!)
and "description" is in-flux, it'd be best to not do something we have to rip
out soon.

BUT (always a BUT), you could read that issue and start authoring these
descriptions. Stuff them inside of comments for now? Maybe we will support a
short pure-text thing AND a longer formatted (PTX XML) thing.

Perhaps Alex can amplify some of this better?

Rob

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[William Haynes]

Dear Rob,

After digging into this a bit myself I learned that Geogebra already has built-in support for altTex.     From https://wiki.geogebra.org/en/Accessibility :

You can have some text attached to the Graphics Views so that it is read by a screen reader.  If you make a text object in GeoGebra called altText, altText2, altText3D then it will be attached to Graphics View 1, Graphics View 2, Graphics View 3D respectively.

This means that I can either add the altText directly to the GeoGebra applet when I create it, or if the schema eventually allows interactives to have <descriptions>, they could be added to the applet by the XSLT.  

GeoGebra also automatically provides verbal descriptions of any visible objects, but I’ve found these descriptions mostly unhelpful.   Writing useful descriptions for complex technical diagrams is going to be very challenging.

Obviously this info only applies to GeoGebra interactives, but I hope it’s useful for someone.

Will

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[Rob Beezer]

Thanks, Will. Perhaps we will help authors along with GeoGebra, so that info is
helpful.

Yes, writing useful descriptions is very challenging. Tom Judson did this for
his AATA project (which is public at the book's repository) and it was a lot of
work. And there is limited guidance. So consider yourself a trailblazer.

If we can accomodate *formatted* text (as discussed on the issue) that'll be a
big step forward in allowing authors to make something useful.

Rob

On 10/12/22 13:09, William Haynes wrote:
> Dear Rob,
>
> After digging into this a bit myself I learned that Geogebra already has
> built-in support for altTex.     From https://wiki.geogebra.org/en/Accessibility
> <https://wiki.geogebra.org/en/Accessibility> :
>
>> You can have some text attached to the Graphics Views so that it is read by a
>> screen reader.  If you make a text object in GeoGebra called |altText|,

>> |altText2|, |altText3D| then it will be attached to Graphics View 1, Graphics

>> View 2, Graphics View 3D respectively.
>>
> This means that I can either add the altText directly to the GeoGebra applet
> when I create it, or if the schema eventually allows interactives to have
> <descriptions>, they could be added to the applet by the XSLT.
>
> GeoGebra also automatically provides verbal descriptions of any visible objects,
> but I’ve found these descriptions mostly unhelpful.   Writing useful
> descriptions for complex technical diagrams is going to be very challenging.
>
> Obviously this info only applies to GeoGebra interactives, but I hope it’s
> useful for someone.
>
>
>
> Will
>
>
>
>
>> On Oct 12, 2022, at 2:41 PM, Rob Beezer <bee...@ups.edu

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[Alex Jordan]

One idea is to make it so that interactives are not "active" when the
page first loads. This is what we are doing now with WeBWorK
exercises. It's static until clicked to activate. An interactive could
work in the same way. Imagine there is a div when the page first
loads, and the div has some combination of a static placeholder, a
description, and a mechanism to activate the interactive. Upon
activation, some PTX javascript replaces the div with an iframe that
has the interactive thing.

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