Christopher-Mark Gilland <clgilland07@...>
When ever did I say that I was disagreeing with
you? The only thing that I disagreed about is your statement which I very likely
have apparently misunderstood that all/most websites are laid out with the exact
format you described. I'm not sure where the disconnect is
occuring.
---
Christopher Gilland
Co-founder of Genuine Safe Haven
Ministries
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2017 1:57
PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM Debate
If that is what you were trying to say, then why
are you disagreeing with me? Having a page be shown as a sighted person
sees it isn't the important factor when working with sighted people.
it's knowing how a page is organized so that when a sighted person says,
the link is on the right, the blind person will know that on the right means
the bloc of links he/she sees at the bottom of the page. This link can
be found with the find command just as easily either way and other navigation
on the page may be easier. Calling this the dom debate isn't accurate
either because it implies that the dom is responsible for
reorganization. The dom doesn't require reorganization.
Reorganization is done by screen-readers by design, because it makes
navigation easier in most contexts. But the dom doesn't prefer one
organization over another. The dom is just a way of making
screen-readers aware of where information is on the screen. How it is
organized is up to the screen-reader designer.
Gene
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2017 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM Debate
Thank you! This precisely 100% what I was
attempting to say initially.
---
Christopher Gilland
Co-founder of Genuine Safe Haven
Ministries
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2017 12:41
PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM
Debate
For many many users it is important to know somehow the
structure how information is being presented because they comunicate and
work together with sighted people. Yes, it is very important to find
content for one self as fast as possible. But we should not forget to learn
structures and so on.
Best
Adriani
Von meinem iPhone gesendet
Hi.
Not
sure I really have anything constructive to contribute to this debate. I
just wanted to say that whatever screen-reader I was using, I always use
the find command, and always have. No tutorials needed. What could be
simpler? There are pages I want to read through, and pages where I just
want to get stuff done. This is often the fastest and most efficient way,
and I feel like this would naturally occur to most users. It sounds like
you are saying it doesn’t, and that surprises me – but I’ve not ever
received much training for anything, as I always preferred to try things
and find out for myself.
Nothing is
perfect. Search is a very underused and very effective feature that
screen-readers offer and it is at times more effective than using other
methods. I didn't say to always use find and I didn't say to always
explore web pages and I didn't say to repeatedly explore the same page
when looking for the same thing. Using find is not exploring the web
page in the sense that you spend a lot of time looking in detail at the
page. At times, this is necessary. It often isn't, and here
are examples.
If you are
looking for an add to cart button, you can use the b command to move
through buttons. Depending on page layout, this may be faster than
using search or it may be slower. Why do you have to explore a page
again every time? You may have to explore a page, you may not.
Doing what I suggested, searching for a word like contact and repeating
the search isn't exploring the page. You are looking for a specific
thing. Also, there are many patterns that a lot of web pages
follow. if you want to listen to a radio station and you are on the
site, if you search for the word "listen" from the top of the page, you
are very likely to find a link with the word "listen" in it, such as
"listen live." What if a site has a link that says, clic, to listen
or some such variation. That's why I strongly advocate against using
the links list on unfamiliar sites. If a link has a word that is
common for such links such as listen, it will often be the first
word. It won't always. Search will find such a link. The
links list, if you move by first letter navigation, won't find it where
you expect and you may waste time and effort looking through a page when
one search for the word "listen" might well have found it.
Contact is
another example. Almost every site that provides a way for you to
contact someone, such as a letters editor, etc. will have the word contact
as part of the link. As in my previous example, contact will often
be the first word. Not always.
The inadequate
training a lot of people get teaches movement by heading and how to
use the skip blocs of links command. But it doesn't anywhere nearly
teach or emphasize using the find command and thus cheats blind people and
makes it much more difficult for them to use sites where headings or other
quick navigation techniques don't yield good results. And there are
times, such as I've discussed, when using other techniques isn't the best
first approach because they often work but not always.
----- Original
Message -----
Sent: Saturday,
December 02, 2017 2:47 AM
Subject: Re: [nvda]
The DOM Debate
Agreed but many people tend
to fall back on their memory of a page as even
if they did explore it
at the start, to do so every time is a bit slow.
Of course some pages
like Google web mail has some shortcuts, but to me I
find such things
still sluggish to use.
Amazon seem to often have interesting
variations on a theme where certain
buttons can be a link instead,
presumably due to their attempts to get you
to buy other stuff when
you selected a particular one. For the sighted this
looks obvious, but
would you actually really want to explore the page
every
time considering how busy their site is with rotating suggestions and
the like? I agree search is a good thing to use but I've been fooled
more
than once by there being several buying choices all with add to
basket
buttons for example.
Brian
bglists@...
Sent
via blueyonder.
Please address personal email to:-
briang1@...,
putting 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name field.
----- Original
Message -----
From: "Gene" <gsasner@...>
To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io>
Sent:
Friday, December 01, 2017 8:19 PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM
Debate
And I wonder how much actual training material such as
tutorials explains
this or does so to any extent. Unless things
have changed, and I havedn't
seen much discussion in quite some time,
even small changes in a web site
causes mass confusion because so many
people aren't taught to explore pages.
Just changing the download link
to a download button caused a lot of
confusion when Send Space made
that change. I hardly noticed it when it
happened because I used
the screen-reader search feature to find the word
"download." I
found the control just as easily and quickly either way.
Actually, the
button is faster and easier because now I just type b once
from the
top of the page to find it. But to those who learn by rote, even
minute changes may lead to an inability to do something on a
site.
Gene
----- Original Message -----
Gene
-----
Original Message -----
From: Ron Canazzi
Sent: Friday, December
01, 2017 12:35 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re:
[nvda] The DOM Debate
Hi Gene,
\
I have had bad
experiences with TVI people. One of them when asked if she
knew
the basics of teaching JAWS said: "No, but I and my client will learn
it together." That speaks volumes.
On
12/1/2017 11:07 AM, Gene wrote:
Certainly, for those who
want to use programs that are not completely
accessible, and that
includes most somewhat demanding and more demanding
users, those are
important things to learn. But in this case, I think my
analysis
points to a much deeper problem, the poor Internet instruction a
lot
of blind people evidently get. I wonder how much traning material
explains things such as I describe. I don't know but I'm
skeptical that it
is explained in a lot of material because of the
kinds of problems and
questions people raise about using the
Internet.
Gene
----- Original Message
-----
From: Ron Canazzi
Sent: Friday, December 01,
2017 9:42 AM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM Debate
Hi
Gene,
Long story short of your analysis: learn
to use your screen reader's quick
navigation keys and other
features. This allows the reorganization and the
advantages of
DOM to coexist.
On 12/1/2017 6:44 AM,
Gene wrote:
If you know how web pages are
actually organized, the contacts problem
and other such possible
problems can be eliminated very easily. We, blind
people,
see a lot of links moving down from the top of the page. A sighted
person sees these running down the left side of the page in a column.
Then
we see the main content below the links. A sighted person sees
the content
toward the middle of the page, moving from left to right
on the page. Then
a blind user sees a lot of links in a block at
the bottom of the page. A
sighted person sees these links
running down the right side of the page in
another column, in the same
way as the links on the left side are seen.
So a
blind person sees a bloc of links at the top, main content below
the
links then another block of links at the bottom. A sighted person
sees
links running down the left side, main content to the right of
those links,
and on the right another block of links running down the
page in a column.
So, if you are using a
screen-reader with the ridiculous word wrap
feature, turn it off if it
isn't off. then do a screen-reader search for
the word contact
from the top of the page. Repeat the search to see how
many
contact links there are. The one a sighted person describes as being
on the right is the one the blind person will see as the second one,
if
there are only two and no more and there shouldn't be any
more. If there is
only one, there is, of course, no
problem. When you get to the last one, if
you repeat the search
again, you will get an error message. If you dismiss
the error
message, you will still be on the link. You won't lose your
place.
You don't have to give up all the
advantages of reorganization and
usually it is much better to leave
reorganization on.
Gene
----- Original Message -----
From:
Christopher-Mark Gilland
Sent: Friday, December 01,
2017 3:08 AM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM Debate
Adriani,
You make some extremely valid points
which should be carefully
considered, yes. Thanks for your
contribution to the thread, and fair enough
statements.
---
Christopher Gilland
Co-founder of Genuine Safe Haven
Ministries
http://www.gshministry.org
(980) 500-9575
----- Original Message
-----
From: Adriani
Botez
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2017 3:58 AM
Subject: Re: [nvda] The DOM
Debate
Hello,
I an not using screen
layout like in your second example due to
following
reasons:
- By navigating with down arrow
link by link I can decide by myself
how fast things are being red
since I can decide not to hear the whole link
label, but only let‘s
say the first half of the word. I don‘t have to wait
until the last
link on the tab is being announced
- If
I want to navigate link by link in screen layout, then I have to
press
the ctrl key and the right arrow key (applies only for link bars like
you have described or for forms with many elements on one line). The
problem
is that pressing ctrl + right arrow NVDA reads word by word
and not link by
link or button by button. So I am navigating much
slower through the content
- When
navigating by ctrl + right arrow through a link bar with 5
links to
focus the last one, I don‘t know when the bar ends unless I have
listened to NVDA reading the whole bar
before
- There is the NVDA addon
audiotheme 3d which gives me a screen
presentation by playing a short
sound in my headfones exactly at the
position where the object is
located on the screen.
Best
Adriani
Von meinem iPhone
gesendet
Am 01.12.2017 um 09:20
schrieb Christopher-Mark Gilland
<clgilland07@...>:
For those who may have a bit of a hearing impairment, let me make it
very clear. In my subject, I'm saying DOM, D O M, not balm, b A L M.
Although some may call DOM the balm. LOL! And here therefore lies the
reason
for my post this morning. - I fully realize that this is
somewhat a
subjective topic, and that everyone will have his or her
own opinions on the
matter. It is therefore my hope, that you, the
reader, have an open and
civil mind, and observe this question from
all angles before making your
response statement on list. I do not
want to see this grow to a heated war
debate. Anyone who would like to
publish this on their website, or wherever
is welcome to do so as long
as you give credit back to
me.
First off, what is
DOM?
DOM, Document
Object Model, without getting too technical, is one
way in which
assistive technology such as screen readers obtain information
from
one's computer screen. When we load a website in our browser of choice,
for example, some screen readers use the DOM functionality to draw a
representation of the content on the
screen.
So, what does
this mean to us
non-techies?
Put simply,
though I am not particularly sure of the exact workflow
which occurs
behind the scene, what I can tell you is this. Often times,
more than
not, this approach requires the assistive technology sitting in
between the user and the web browser to redraw, as some would say, the
entire HTML content in completion. The reason that the word "redraw"
is used
is because essentially, this is exactly what is
happening.
Once a
website is loaded, a certain amount of memory is allocated
aside where
the website in question may be rendered. There are a few
advantages to
this, however there are also some huge
setbacks.
Beauty and the
Beast
One of the
advantages which probably appears to be fairly obvious
from an
outsider's perspective is that this will allow assistive technology
to
use certain methods to gather the web content and then present the
material in an easy, robust, and sensably accessible manor. As the
writer of
this post, let me assure all of you... I definitely see the
side of this
argument.
Here's a
practical example of
DOM.
Let's assume, for
just a moment, that you have loaded a website in
the browser of your
preference, be it Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome,
etc.
On this
particular page, there are links which visually appear as
horizontal
tabs extending across the top of the page. These tabs include the
following:
a.. Home
b..
About Us
c..
Blog
d..
Shop
e..
Support
f..
Contact Us
To fully
understand how this works, I encourage you to read the
following part
of this e-mail by using your down arrow key, and reading line
by line
individually. Here is what you will see. Remember before I go any
further with this, all of these links visually appear as one strip of
horizontal tabs running across the top of the web
page.
Link
Home
Link About
Us
Link
Blog
Link
Shop
Link
Support
Link Contact
Us
Here's another
example.
You have a
short form on a website. This form asks for your first
name, your last
name, and your e-mail address. Here's how DOM most likely
would
reinterpret this. Again, please read this line by
line.
Please fill out
the following form so we may keep in
touch.
First
name
Edit
Last
name
Edit
E-mail
Edit
Submit
button
Clear form
button.
First example
without DOM
Read this
line by line, and make sure this window with my message is
maximized
before doing so.
Link
home, Link About Us, Link Blog, Link Shopt, Link Support, Link
Contact
Us.
Second example
without DOM
Please fill
out the following form so we may keep in
touch.
First name
Edit
Last name
Edit
E-mail Edit, Submit:
button, Clear form:
Button.
The
difference
As you can
see in the above four illustrations, the first two
examples were
rendered in such that each link/form control was on its own
line. This
is why I asked you to read line by line, as doing a say-all, you
never
would have most likely caught this. So, in other words, let's make
this really easy in plain
english.
Refer back to
my very first example where we had the tabs which are
being
represented as hyperlinks. As you recall, I said that they all went
horizontally from left to right across the top of the
page.
The problem is,
DOM renders each element, for lack of better word,
as its own separate
item. For this reason, each element is on its own
dedicated line of
text. This is why each link is seeming to appear on its
own line by
itself. The truth is, these links in all actuality are not on
multiple
lines. They are actually expanding across the entire marginal width
of
the screen. Are you starting to see where this could be a potential
problem?
The second
example is slightly less annoying, however the point
still stands in
existance.
We have a
form. If you've ever seen how a form generally looks on a
print sheet
of paper, you'll note that most form field labels such as first
name,
last name, etc. go down the left side of the sheet of paper. Then,
horizontally aligned beside these field labels is the data
value.
For example, I
might have a form printed out which I sign for a
Hippa release at my
doctor's office. The first field may say, "Name". Out to
the immediate
right of this will be either a line, or a box. It just depends
on how
the form is designed, but the over all point is, there will be a
second column to the immediate right of where it said, "First name".
This is
where I would write, "Christopher (Middle name) Gilland.
Obviously, some of
you may know my middle name, but for privacy sake,
I'm not including it
here.
Given how the
above physical print paper illustration is formatted,
as most forms
online or not would be, does it really make sense to have the
form
field, then the data directly below? No. It
doesn't.
Look at my
above second example without DOM. Notice that the edit
box for all
three fields is now actually rendering exactly as it would be
visually
on the screen. The boxes are to the immediate right of the fields,
on
the same line. Doesn't that just naturally feel better in your mind, and
make more sense? It definitely should to most
people.
Finally, we have
both the submit, and the clear
vbuttons.
Does it make
sense to you that they'd both be virtically stacked one
on top of the
other? It certainly doesn't to me! In fact, to me, I'd even go
so far
as to say it seems absolutely gross! Maybe I am more a visual
learner,
but even if I wasn't, this doesn't logically compute. However, this
is
exactly how DOM is rendering it... One button, and one element per
line.
Helping the
sighted to guide you
So
why is this such a vbig deal? Call me a perfectionist, but let's
assume for just a moment that you're on the phone with a customer
service
representative. They tell you to click the contact us tab
located in the
upper right corner of the page. This would be a very
poor website design,
and to any web debvs on here, please for the love
of god, take this in
consideration! I can't tell you though how many
times I've seen this. A web
designer will put a contact link at the
top of the page which has a form to
e-mail them. Further down the
page, they have another contact link within
the actual main body's
content. The difference however is, in this second
link, though named
identically the same thing, "Contact Us", this second
link doesn't
direct the visiter to a contact form, but instead gives a phone
number, fax number, and possibly a postal address. Totally
unacceptable in
my view! All this should be consolidated on the one
contact page at the top
of the screen. This however still proves my
point, and like I said, I've
seen this more times than I could count,
and would gbe rich if I had a
dollar for every time I have. OK, so,
you now arrow through the page, or do
an NVDA find to locate the
Contact link. Heck, you might even do NVDA+F7 to
bring up your links
list. And believe me, though I'm directing this more as
an NVDA thing,
NVDA isn't the only screen reader which can use the DOM
method. JAWS,
for example, is incredibly! and I do mean, incredibly!
notorious for
this. Now, think about this a minute with this really
convoluted
scanareo regarding the contact link. - How are you going to know
which
contact link to press enter on to open the contact form, if you're in
DOM navigation? Exactly! - You won't. It would be hit and
miss.
Now, let's take
this same situation without DOM
mode.
In this
environment, for lack of better word, you would observe both
via
audible speech, as well as via braille output if you have a display,
that the first "Contact us" link is on the far right edge of the
screen.
You'd know this as you'd see the other links like Home, About
us, Blog, etc.
on the same line but to the immediate left before it.
Does this make sense
what I'm
saying?
The bottom
line
Regardless if you
choose to use DOM or not is not something anyone
should decide for an
individual. If you are coming from a screen reader like
JAWS as I
have, you definitely may find turning off DOM navigation to be
extremely awquard at best. I'd even go as far as to say that it may
drive
you absolutely crazy at first, and make your web browsing
experience seem
dreadful. I would however seriously encourage people
to at least give it a
try for a few days without DOM navigation.
Inevitably, if you're not used to
it, it's going to take some getting
used to, however if you're anything like
me, I feel that eventually,
you will really start to see the benefits of not
using DOM. DOM is
great in my opinion, don't get me wrong, but if you want,
or need in a
mission critical environment to have an exact representation of
the
content, then fact is fact, you're not going to get it with DOM mode,
end of the story, it's just not gonna happen, period. You might as
well just
accept it. The other thing to also realize is, you are
taking up unnecessary
memory/processor power to render things
differently as an offline model.
Granted, OK, it may not be much, but
that's not the point. It's still taking
up what to some would be
considered as unnecessary
resources.
What are your
thoughts?
Do you use
DOM? If not, I'd be interested in your reasons why
not.
Chris.
--
They Ask Me If I'm Happy; I say Yes.
They ask:
"How Happy are You?"
I Say: "I'm as happy as a stow away chimpanzee on
a banana boat!"
--
They Ask Me If I'm Happy; I say Yes.
They
ask: "How Happy are You?"
I Say: "I'm as happy as a stow away
chimpanzee on a banana boat!"
|
