user-created content: maintaining accessibility & usability when we don't control the...
DESCRIPTION
Social Media sites and Learning Management Systems rely on end-users, not web developers, to create the content at the heart of the site. How can we design our interfaces to encourage users to create usable, accessible content? Can we train our users without annoying them or driving them away? What tools can we give them to make it easier for them to create the best content? Whether we have professors using Moodle or Sakai to create coursework for students, or bloggers communicating on Diaspora, identi.ca, or Dreamwidth, we want it to be easy for our users to create content every bit as accessible and usable as we would create ourselves. [The meat of this presentation is in the notes; visible on a slide by slide basis or in a PDF of the entire presentation, available at http://suberic.net/~deborah.kaplan/lca2014-upload.pdf . Sadly PPT-to-PDF notes view has no alt for the slides, and slideshare has no way of modifying a transcript to include off-slide text. In other words, my authoring tools got in the way of the accessibility of my content. The most accessible version is probably to download the PPT from slideshare, which hopefully maintained the image alt!]TRANSCRIPT
{
User-Created Content
Maintaining accessibility & usability when we don't control the content
{
{Principles
Introduction
Make the right thing happen automatically
Teach the user as they create
Help the users do the right thing
{Examples in the alt attribute
What Not to Do
http://wave.webaim.org/
“FooBar” authoring tool
<$foobarAssetDescription$>
Interface only sometimes prompts for alt
Unclear field labels Biggest text box not always useful Alt should be context-sensitive Prepopulation is confusing Alt should be descriptive text or alt="", never filename
No help!
“Xyzzy” authoring tool
caption
caption
Alt text
Alt and caption are identical Human factor: visual result will be
unappealing to site’s usersbase
{More examples in the alt attribute
Help your users
Dreamwidth
Only two fields.
Inline help
Link to more information
Know your users
How many options can they tolerate? Are you enforcing or encouraging? What kind of education can you do? Do they already care about accessibility? What visual effect is acceptable to your
users? What level of hand coding can they do?
{Accessible embeds and styles
Silent Helping
Deborah Kaplan@deborah_guhttp://deborah.dreamwidth.org/
Further thoughts: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php Comparing Learning Management
Systems: http://weba.im/csun2013lms Web Accessibility for the 21st century:
https://github.com/rahaeli/accessibility
Questions?