OpenCore Software

Yesterday I wrote a post about accessibility, and have been getting some useful feedback on that post.  One post in particular suggested a number of free screen readers.  The built-in readers on Mac and Windows are also suggested.

I just installed NVDA on a Windows machine and tried out just our front page.  NVDA seems a little quirky — it stutters often and maybe just has some performance issues.  I think I hit ins+down (which tells it to read the current page) a couple times to many, as it was slow to start reading, and then kept reading the first line over and over.  But after that got worked out the page does reasonably well.  A couple things I noticed:

• Our search box doesn’t seem to have any label, and NVDA reads the access key.  A weird choice.  If we add a title attribute I am sure this would fix it, but sometimes the tooltips can be annoying.  Here I think a tooltip is actually justified, since there’s no other label.
• Titles on the project icons are distracting, and cause the title to be read twice.  An empty alt would read better there.  But it’s contextual — if the icon is placed next to the title (which it usually is) then an empty alt is best.  But if it is on its own (is it ever?) then it should have a title.
• Portuguese turns into gobbledygook.  I doubt we can do anything useful about that.  But there’s not even a hint that it is a foreign language, it just starts saying weird words (and not Portuguese either, since it’s using English pronunciation).
• Navigation links seem quite usable; they are well placed, labeled sufficiently (I think).  It takes time to read through a page, so succinct labels actually seem better than complete labels.  But for a long page of chunks, like our front page, actually getting to a content chunk (e.g., site news) takes a long time, and you can’t tell how far off it is.
• I was complaining in my article about the difficulty of distinguishing <em> from <i>­.  I can report that the bold strong text on our front page sounds lousy, so I don’t know why I’d be concerned which kind of lousy it should sound like.  These finer points of markup don’t seem to make up any noticeable part of the experience.­  (And stupid Xinha, probably due to misguided ideas of accessibility and standards, translates my <i> to <em> without even asking.)
  

I haven’t actually tried doing more than reading the site.  Making the site readable is itself an important goal, and I think where we should start.  Actually interacting with the site as an author is going to be much harder.  How is Xinha going to work?  Well, I suppose I should give it a quick try, but I’m not optimistic.  I imagine if you become very familiar with the layout of the screens it would be possible.  But reading screens like the edit screen, or even worse this WordPress composition screen, is going to be hard.